House Committee urges DPR to enforce gas metreage as FG discovers 178 gas flare sites

The House of Representatives Adhoc Committee investigating revenue leakages in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry has urged the Department of Petroleum Resources, DPR to compel oil companies to install meters targeted at harnessing associated gas for positive applications in the nation.

The Committee disclosed that massive gas flaring was still ongoing in many parts of the Niger Delta, adding that the development has culminated in the huge loss of revenue.

The Chairman of the Committee, Hon Jarigbe Agom Jarigbe disclosed at the end of its sitting in Lagos that gas flaring remains a major challenge in Nigeria as a result of many reasons, including limited funding of major gas projects, inadequate monitoring and weak enforcement of sanctions.

‘’From our preliminary findings, gas flaring is still ongoing in many oil and gas producing areas. This is unacceptable to the government.

‘’Nigeria has commercial gas reserves which should be harnessed for export and domestic applications. It is in the best interest of all stakeholders, especially oil companies, the Federal Government and states to bring gas flaring to an end.

‘’As a Committee, we will do our very best, including visiting all onshore and offshore platforms to monitor the operations of the companies.’’

Hon. Ehiozuwa John Agbonayinma, a member of the Committee said that: ‘’the DPR must rise to its responsibilities. Sanctions must be implemented to curb the menace of impunity and corruption in the industry.’’

Hon Denis Agbo, another member of the Committee also called on the DPR to provide details of Offshore Safety Permit, OSP, National Data Repository, NDR and DPR account with the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, adding that it was necessary to know the percentage of the funds remitted to the Federation Account.

A few days ago, the government had disclosed that it discovered at least 178 gas flaring sites in Nigeria.

Speaking in Abuja, at the Gas Buyers’ Forum, organized by the Gas Aggregation Company of Nigeria, Programme Coordinator of the Nigerian Gas Flare Commercialisation Programme in the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, Mr. Justice Derefaka, had stated that the verification exercise was conducted in conjunction with the World Bank, United States Agency for International Development, USAID, and the Canadian government.

“Data is very key to us. Without accurate gas flare data, then this programme is dead on arrival. What we are doing beyond the data that we have at the National Depository in DPR, is that we are going beyond what they have, and we have sent a special template we designed with the World Bank and the USAID, asking for unique data sets from the producers, and it would amaze you what we found out.

“Our verification with our partners showed that we have 178. That in itself is not complete because we are around 60 percent, 40 percent data is missing, some of the information is inaccurate. So, we are doing a detailed information request in the DPR office in Lagos. So that we send this information and get these things back, then these things might increase.

“In this country, right now, we have 178 gas flare sites, of the 16,000 that we have globally in 19 countries. Daily, we flare around 755 million SCF per day; you can imagine how much we lose as a country. The carbon credit we would have gotten from this, the electricity we would have generated, the LPGs and the likes of those, even if they had to go to any of the LNG trains.”