The Agreement with Nigeria was signed after years of preparation, fieldwork, evaluation and planning on the part of P&ID. The project was not a novel concept and it only failed when the Nigerian government failed to live up to its end of the contract, namely to supply the gas for processing and building the pipeline it had agreed to construct. The consequences of the Nigerian government’s decision have been immense and have continued to leave millions of Nigerians in the dark without reliable electricity. Sadly, the government continues to this day with uncontrolled, wasteful flaring of natural gas that is released during oil drilling, which is squandering Nigeria’s natural resources and leaving a big hole in the country’s exchequer. A government taskforce – Nigerian Gas Flare Commercialisation Programme (NGFCP)– found that in 2016 alone, Nigeria failed to earn over $1.1 billion in potential gas revenue, as a result of flaring as much as 275 billion cubic feet of natural gas. New data from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) showed that between Q1 and Q3 2018, oil and gas firms flared a total of 9 billion standard cubic feet of natural gas for a total loss of US $547 million in potential profits. Worse, the flared gas could have provided desperately needed electricity in a country where four million out of 32m households do not have access to electricity. Were it not for the Nigerian government’s decision, another 2000 megawatts of electricity could have provided power for more than 7.5 million people.
P&ID Facts > Myth/Fact > The P&ID plan to process the natural gas so that it could help power Nigeria’s electric grid was unrealistic to begin with, and was never going to be achievable.