Blessing Okorite, Port Harcourt
A veteran environmentalist, Dr. Nnimmo Bassey who is also the Director, Health of Mother Earth Foundation, has called on the President Muhammadu Buhari’s led Federal Government to ensure oil and gas exploration companies in Nigeria install metering facilities in oilfields in order to ascertain the quantity of gas produced as well as flared, so they can pay for any amount of gas flared into the environment.
The environmentalist made the call on Tuesday in Port Harcourt, at the “1st Peoples Dialogue in the state of gas flaring in Nigeria”, organised by Chima Williams and Associates in collaboration with Public Interest Lawyering Initiative for West Africans and Green Alliance Nigeria with support from Advocates for Community Alternatives.
He noted that gas flaring would have been stopped if government had taken the issue seriously. He said: “The problem of gas flaring has been lingering for over 60 years and from the late 1970s government realised that they had to stop it.
The first terminal date was January 1, 1984 when President Muhammadu Buhari was then a Military Head of State. Since that time gas flaring has been illegal but we still have flaring going on.
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“To know how much oil and gas is extracted from Nigeria, we need the federal government to sit up and insist that there is proper metering in the oil and gas fields, so we can know what we are talking about, so that anyone who flares gas would pay for the commercial quantity of what is being flared.
“Knowing how much gas flared is simply to install all the metres and the oil and gas exploration companies have been resisting this according to what we heard from the Department of Petroleum Resources”.
Nnimmo Bassey who stated that for companies to flare gas they should pay the commercial value of that gas, said “gas can be used for economic purposes. But not everybody is going to campaign for establishment of gas plants because gas is not cleaner than oil neither is it cleaner than coal.
“As the world is moving away from fossil fuels, Nigeria should actually at this time begin to invest in renewal energy sources because in 10/20 years whether you have gas, you have oil, you have coal, the world is moving away, just like the world is moving away from using stones. The oil edge and gas edge will end even though we have oil and gas”.
In his welcome address, the convener of the programme, Chima Williams recalled that during a 2016 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Morocco, President Buhari stated that the federal government will end gas flaring in 2020. Williams stated that the reason for the meeting was to bring together different actors on the issue of gas flaring, tackle the issue and unanimously influence the government to within the ambit of the law end the gas flare in Nigeria.
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He said, “One of the reasons for this dialogue, is to tell president Buhari to remember the actions he took as a military head of state to end gas flare because he understood the importance of ending gas flaring in Nigeria, now that he is a civilian president, he is more responsible to Nigerians who elected him. “I believe that the president was honest when he made that promise in Marrakech, Morocco in November 2016 that the government would do everything within its power to end gas flaring in 2020.
We want to remind him and equally ask him to fulfill that promise. Williams, expressed optimism that ending gas flaring was achievable specially as the minister of state for petroleum was from the south-south region which was adversely affected by the effects of gas flaring. “Again, we have a son of the soil as minister of state, Petroleum, who knows a lot about the impacts of gas flaring in our communities, because he sees them even in his own community, to help talk to Mr. president to do everything to end it.
“This is also a clarion call for us to mobilise our voices to support Mr. President and his government to end gas flaring even this year, it is doable with technology, it only needs somebody to push these oil companies to be willing to do”.
