Mrs. Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, NNPC Ltd’s executive vice president, Upstream, disclosed this during a Panel Session at the ongoing 2024 CERAWeek Conference in Houston, the United States on Tuesday.

Eyesan, whose session addressed the theme,

“What are the Choices for Upstream Strategies?” said Nigeria is a predominantly gas-rich country which boasts of over 200TCF of gas that can be leveraged for the country’s industrialisation and economic development.

She noted that NNPC Ltd plans to deepen gas utilization domestically for industrialization and ensuring that the entire country feels and optimizes the use of the resource.

She said the Company is vigorously opening avenues for infrastructural gas development through various gas projects spread across the country.

“Our focus is how do we move from predominantly oil player to gas player and not just for gas for the sake of gas but gas for power generation, and for industrialization, “she stated.

Eyesan observed that the NNPC Ltd is also focused on emission reduction and gas flare-out.

“We want to capture all gas flared, utilize it and for domestic use and and ultimately, increase our energy transition footprints,” she said.

“NNPC is keying into the government agenda of using gas as a transition fuel and for us, we want to ensure not only the domestic gas market, but we also expand that to the region and internationally,” she said.

While calling on African countries to collaborate with one another in order to ensure even distribution of energy resources, Eyesan said collaboration is key as not all countries within the sub-region are endowed with equal with equal proportion of energy resources.

“For us to ensure that we continue to subsist within the sub-region, we must be willing to work collaboratively and ensure that there is even distribution of energy resources we have across the sub-region.”

On energy transition, Eyesan stated that the subject has evolved over the years, adding that for Sub-Saharan Africa, the narrative has been on how to address the energy poverty issue while for Nigeria, the NNPC Ltd. will continue to look at areas where it has competitive advantage to define the strategy.

Other energy experts on the panel are the Chief Upstream Strategist, Energy, S&P Global Commodity Insights, Bob Fryklund; President of Pathways Alliance, Kendall Dilling and the Executive Vice President, Exploration and Production International, Equinor, Philippe Mathieu.

Mrs. Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, NNPC ’s executive vice president, Upstream, made the call on Wednesday at a panel session in the ongoing 2024 Nigerian International Energy Summit (NIES 2024) holding in Abuja.

Speaking on the theme: “Innovation, Collaboration, and Resilience: Empowering Independent Producers in the Dynamic Energy Era”, Eyesan stated that past experiences with divestments and how the assets were operated have left much to be desired as most of them experienced a drop in production rather than growth.

“In the industry, if you want to measure success, there are some basic indicators that you utilise – production growth, reserves growth, and asset integrity. If I were to evaluate prior investment initiatives and scale the actors using these indices, I will be untrue to myself if I say everybody has done well. Yes, we acquired the assets; but today, we are worse off in terms of production than we were when we did the acquisition”, the EVP lamented.

She, however, acknowledged that there were some success stories in the operations of the independent producers.

She identified some of the challenges to include insecurity, lack of finance, and lack of technological capacity, stressing that with collaboration among industry players, the challenges could be surmounted.

“Collaboration cannot be overemphasized. Somebody said we should be in a state of emergency, and I totally agree with that. It’s not by sitting here and talking about the challenges, I think we should have a war room where we raise the issues and set out concrete plans to resolve them rather than wait for stakeholders individually to take them on. We need collaboration, collaboration, and collaboration”, she enthused.

The panel session had key players in the sector such as: the Chief Executive Officer of Aradel Holdings, Mr. Adegbite Falade; Managing Director of SNEPCo, Mrs Elohor Aiboni; Managing Director of First E & P Development Company, Mr. Demola Adeyemi-Bero; and Chief Executive Officer, TotalEnergies, Mr. Matthieu Bouyer.

Others on the panel were: the Chief Executive Officer, ExxonMobil Nigeria, Mr. Shane Harris; Chief Operating Officer, Oando Energy Resources, Dr Ainojie Alex Irune; and Director, Joint Venture, Chevron Nigeria, Mr. Cosmas Iwueze.