Gas to power: Lessons from Afam VI

The Shell/Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) joint venture recently celebrated the fact that the partnership has produced 20 million megawatts (MW) of electricity that was pumped into the national grid in the last seven years through the Afam VI power plant, which has an installed capacity of 650 MW. This is equivalent to 24-hour power supply to over one million residential consumers or nearly 180,000 medium-sized commercial enterprises for six years. It is also worth six years of 24-hour power supply to Port Harcourt city alone!

Apart from providing reliable electricity to the national grid, Afam VI plant has also opened windows of opportunities in terms of job creation as over 150 Nigerians from the 16 host communities have been gainfully engaged because of the presence of the power plant. This is just a fragment of the positive things that could happen to the Nigerian economy were all the other power plants up and running.

One of the reasons why this achievement was possible is that the Afam VI plant is located close to the source of gas, thereby eliminating the challenge of pipeline vandalism. This nearness enables the plant to run without any serious hiccup in terms of gas supply as it takes shorter time to get gas to the plant from the Shell gas facility at Okoloma, where the gas volume is said to be such that the power plant cannot use up to 60 percent of it.

This is very much unlike other power plants that are sited several kilometres away from the gas sources. For instance, it has been said that there are more gas reserves in the Eastern Niger Delta than in the Western Niger Delta where the bulk of the power plants are located.

In fact, the euphoria that greeted the construction of some of the Niger Delta power plants has eventually fizzled out because the people’s expectations are not met. The culprit, as usual, is lack of gas which has rendered at least 10 of such plants inactive. Meanwhile, the old Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) assets that were bought by investors are also not better because of the same problem.

One lesson in this is for policymakers to always factor in the source of the raw material in the siting of any future project. This is basic economics.

In the meantime, there is need to get the inactive power plants in the Niger Delta back on their feet. To do this, the companies working on the East-West gas pipelines must be encouraged to expedite action on the construction work which is meant to ensure that enough gas is transferred to the Western axis from the reserves in the Eastern axis.

Furthermore, we urge the government to sit up now and enforce the implementation of the gas master plan which would ensure gas availability. It is indeed unacceptable that a country that is regarded as a gas province is still experiencing epileptic electricity supply due partly to gas supply issues, a situation that threatens to cripple our economy.