President Goodluck Jonathan says Nigeria’s power industry can only grow through liberalisation: The government will sell 11 distribution companies created out of Power Holding Co. of Nigeria, the state-owned utility, and allow private companies to set up power plants using natural gas, hydro-electric dams and coal-powered stations, Jonathan said in a speech in Lagos, the… Read More »
… more oil is spilled from the [Niger] delta’s network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP‘s Deepwater Horizon rig last… Read More »
WSJ: A Lack of Flare: In the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria, petroleum companies use giant torches to burn off natural gas found with deposits of crude oil. The decades-old industry practice, known as flaring, has long been criticized as wasteful and harmful to the environment because of the carbon dioxide it releases into… Read More »
From Vanguard: Nigeria’s excess crude account has dropped from $20 billion (N3.004 trillion) at the beginning of the year to $11.2 billion (N1.646trn) in June. This implies that in the last six months, the various tiers of government in the federation have shared a total of $9bn (N1.323tr) from that account. This use of the… Read More »
Sometime ago I wrote a post about my efforts to understand the Nigerian oil industry. Some Next reporters have done an article on their efforts to understand the industry. Nobody seems to know how much Nigerian exports, or how much it makes from oil: Even a cursory check by NEXT has revealed that various agencies… Read More »
Ogho Okiti of BusinessDay has a nice analysis: How about another $5 billion for subsidy? Thanks to soaring crude oil prices, we are receiving significant amount of income from crude oil exports. Never mind that the government and the economy would have been in so much trouble by now, underlined by significant short fall in… Read More »