Mr. Tony Attah, MD, NLNG
We are Nigeria LNG, with a very big vision of being a global LNG player on the one hand, and on the other hand, helping to build a better Nigeria. I want to spend the next few minutes just dimensioning the subject to stimulate the conversation today looking from a global perspective, through Africa as Mr. Kan helped us to look at and then come back home to say, what exactly can we do?
He did mention already that we are going to add 2 billion people to the world. Essentially, Africa will take a giant percentage there. So when you start to talk about access to energy, Africa is referred to as that continent in darkness, if you are polite. Essentially, some people refer to it as the dark continent. More than half of Africa has no access to energy, and Nigeria is even seen as not in good standing as it affects electricity.
The world is moving on
But globally, the world is moving on. Energy has been in transition, from manpower to stone, through oil, gas, coal. And more recently, the conversation is heavy on renewables. So the world needs cleaner energy, the world needs it more affordable, but most importantly, because the world needs it in a reliable and secure manner, not epileptic, as some may have experienced.
So overall energy transition has arrived. Nigeria is so dependent on oil. And we from Nigeria LNG have been on the matter for a long time, taking the debate further, because today, we have absolute conviction that we have more gas than oil, which is why I discussed in another forum, where I was introduced as one from an oil-rich nation, and the moderator was very swift to say, No, Nigeria is a gas nation. Even I had to take that into perspective before it dawned on me that actually, our biggest opportunity as a nation is really gas. On a per barrel of equivalent basis, we actually have more gas than oil. And as such, we keep saying it’s time for gas, but we will show an example of what other people have done with gas.
But whether you choose to change or not, or to accelerate the gas, the world is not waiting for us as Nigerians, the world is not waiting for us as Africans, the world is moving on. And we started talking about renewables. So a lot of conversation around solar, a lot of conversation around wind, a lot of conversation around hydro. But more importantly, there is a new kid on the block, that’s about to take our lunch, and that is called hydrogen. Hydrogen, most of you know, is found in the air composition, but is also water.
Driving cars on water
We were at a conference in 2017 in Japan. And we were talking to a group of Japanese scientists, and one of them said, We are Japanese. We are not as lucky as your country, Nigeria. We don’t have oil, we don’t have gas. But in the next 20 years, we are going to be driving our cars on water. And we all laughed. But in hindsight, that laughter was an absolute display of our ignorance, because we couldn’t understand what they were talking about. At that point, Japan was already ahead in terms of technological studies around how to crack hydrogen out of water. To the extent that he actually did say, the War of the future is not going to be about oil and gas, it is going to be about water.
Abundant hydrogen
So there is a lot there and the world has abundant hydrogen, and we are going to be irrelevant as a nation if we don’t move. So today, coal is taking a back burner, even though there are still countries that are heavy on coal, but the environmental implication of being heavy on coal is forcing them to shift to gas and they are beginning to see the benefit. The oil will also take a little slack, it will disappear. Because as we saw, the global demand is about to rise by more than 30% in the next 20 years. So where will the energy come from? And what energy will be acceptable to the world? And I think that is a huge conversation. But here we are. With the conversation, that gas will be more relevant. We have a lot of gas.
So the question is, what are you doing about it? When will you move forward to be deliberate about gas? And that’s why we talk about Nigeria and the biggest opportunity. You saw that our population is the biggest resource that we have. 200 million people 200 TCF of gas, but most importantly another 600 TCF scope for recovery. Yes, indeed we are number ninth-largest reserve but if you prove the 600 TCF, we go straight to number four, just behind Turkmenistan, Iran, and the other nations. So the opportunity and the potential are immense. But like with everything, potential means nothing unless you make it count.
The conversation
And I think that’s the conversation we want to have today. My good friend on CNN, Richard Quest is the one credited with the statement that it’s not what you have, it is what you do with it that counts. And because today we are so gas-rich and energy-poor, it’s incumbent that we start to talk about what we can do with gas. If you look at the data below, we have by far more gas than all these three countries listed, but on a capacity basis, look at the LNG plants that they have.
Energy transition
This is being deliberate about harnessing the value of your resource. Nigeria LNG, the biggest LNG plant in around is 22 million tons despite our 200 TCF, and that’s partly why we are saying it’s really a time to take advantage of this resource and start to monetize it. As the world is transiting, the risk is incumbent on us that we potentially could get to a point where even the gas just like oil is not going to be as relevant in the future becomes not any relevant if technology, which I believe is the biggest disruption takes center stage to make hydrogen more available and easier to access, then we have a big issue, as we say there is still coal in Enugu, for those who are from the 50s, you can imagine the biggest economy at the time was underpinned by coal.
The locomotives, everything was about coal, power with about coal. But today no one talks about Enugu with respect to energy. So energy is in full transition. And we believe it’s time to monetize Nigeria’s gas today. We just touched on a quick case study of Qatar. Someone mentioned Qatar already from a proficient country to a gas giant, and it took just 10 years, which is why we as Nigeria LNG firmly believe in the conversation and the narrative about the declaration of the decade of gas. We believe it is possible.
Let’s look at Qatar
If you look at Qatar from 1995. When they really went into gas development, we were just two years behind Qatar. So Qatar’s first gas LNG was in 1997. Nigeria’s first LNG was in 1999, just two years behind. But then within 10 years because of the deliberateness of the government and focus on gas, they have gone to 77 million tonnes and we are at best 22 million tonnes.
We’ve made major in-roads with the support of the Honorable Minister of State for petroleum, The Group Managing Director of NNPC, the executive circuitry of NCDMB, and our shareholders NNPC, Shell, Total, and Eni, taking the ultimate decision for train-7. But Train 7 is only going to add about 8 million tonnes to take us to 30 million tonnes and just recently to establish Qatar’s dominance and deliberateness and focus on gas, they have taken an FID for 30million tonnes. We celebrated Train-7 on the back of 8 million tonnes to take us to thirty. They have taken FID for 30 million tonnes. Essentially, our overall existence as a country is their increment. And for me, that is about how deliberate you can be.
Look at how much they have made it count in Qatar. But for Nigeria LNG, we continue to deliver value to the nation. It is a success story, but we believe it can be much bigger. Today with 23 dedicated ships taking our flag around the world, showing names like LNG Bonny, LNG Rivers, we are showcasing Nigeria. We remain the biggest made-in-Nigeria product establishing the presence of Nigeria globally but more importantly in the energy space, having contributed more than $100 billion to the nation in terms of revenue, 35 billion dividends to the nation, but that 8 billion in taxes since we became a taxpayer. We think tapping more gas is the way to go.
Train 7
Train 7 is an opportunity, but on the back of what Qatar has just done, we think Train 7 is no longer ambitious. If we’re really going to tap into making it count, but most importantly, using what we have, and growing on the back of that.
So overall, we fully support the ambition to push on the decade of gas. We offer ourselves as the galvanizing platform for the decade of gas, we offer ourselves as partners to the government. But most importantly, we say we are available. If you can produce the gas, we can take it, because the old conversation around “show me the market I’ll produce”, and the market says “show me the gas, I’ll buy it within Nigeria LNG is set to break that, but overall gas is the future. That future is now, and just as the honorable minister of state made us realize, Gas is food – in fertilizer, Gas is transportation, as you saw in the autogas project that was declared, Gas is life as a matter of fact, for cooking, for heating, for existence. Gas is development in manufacturing, gas is power.
Gas is everything, we are ready
And we believe gas is everything. But overall, I will like to stop here with a quote from a friend that I read. He says “Our degree of vulnerability as a nation is directly proportional to our degree of dependence on oil”. And more recently, you saw the vagaries of sliding oil prices pushing us into recession. We think it’s time for gas. It’s time for Nigeria to diversify. And that is why we fully support the decade of gas.
Being the full presentation of Mr. Tony Attah, MD/CEO, NLNG Limited at the just concluded 12th biennial International Conference themed “POWERING FORWARD: ENABLING NIGERIA’S INDUSTRIALISATION VIA GAS” on February 25 – 26, 2021
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