Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has encouraged Nigerians to embrace new energy following the increment in petrol prices following international oil market impact.
Prof Osinbajo on Thursday during The Africa Reports’ Digital Dialogues webinar themed “Bouncing Back – Nigeria’s Post Pandemic Plans”, explained that Nigeria oil has not fared well since the coronavirus pandemic hit the world.
He noted that the recent removal of fuel subsidy by the federal government was inevitable because it did not have the resource to support subsidy.
Detailing government intervention, the Vice President said, “We effectively deregulated the petroleum sector on March 18 2020 and this was due to the inability of the government to continue to pay subsidy especially at the time when revenues dropped by almost 60% due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We had paid N722 billion in 2018 and N546 billion in 2019.”
“We want to do a sustainability plan to ensure that businesses survive, to ensure that we continue to provide services, pay salaries etc and all we currently have is 500billion and that is the honest truth, we simply don’t have the money to sustain a subsidy regime.”
The Vice President added that, “We intend to use an economic approach to address the matter and that would involve the use of Compressed Natural Gas (CNG).
“CNG is about half the price of Petrol today which is around 80 naira. The government would be responsible for the cost of conversion of the cars and buses so that they can use both CNG and Petrol and in this way the average person, transporter, individual who owns a car, would be able to get energy to power their cars at about half the current cost of petrol.”
“To give an example, Dangote who has a large fleet of trucks has already converted about 5,000 trucks to be able to utilize CNG and diesel.
“There is a trial in Edo state going on currently in the conversion of cars to hybrid ones. Almost the entire subcontinent of India relies on CNG and they do not even have petrol. Both are imported and utilized to save cost,” he noted.
Any existing gasoline vehicle can be converted to a dual-fuel (gasoline/CNG) vehicle.
Authorized shops can do the retrofitting and involves installing a CNG cylinder, plumbing, a CNG injection system and the electronics.
The cost of installing a CNG conversion kit can often reach $800 on passenger cars and light trucks and is usually reserved for vehicles that travel many miles each year.
CNG costs about 50% less than gasoline and emits up to 90% fewer emissions than gasoline.
