The Presidential CNG Initiative, a component of the Palliative Intervention of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration, working towards reducing the country’s dependency on fossil fuel, has inaugurated the first CNG training and installation facility in Lagos, Nigeria.
Built by Fixit45, the facility, a workshop for CNG conversion training and installation with technical support and collaboration with Mijo Autogas Pvt, India, was officially inaugurated on Thursday by Chief Executive Officer, Pi-CNG, Michael Oluwagbemi at Ilupeju, Lagos.
Speaking during the event, the Pi-CNG boss described the CNG landscape in the last six month as a demonstration of what can be achieved when the government efforts are geared towards making life better for the people by enabling good policy.
He said: ‘’We are grateful to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who enabled us to set out on this journey that is now catalyzing into the kind of change and development we are getting in the sector.
“Apart from inaugurating the facility, we have come to see some of the interesting thing that Fixit45 is doing, to set Nigeria on the part of cleaner, safer, cheaper and more reliable source of energy in the transportation sector.
“Nigeria is a gas country with the highest gas reserve in Africa, top 7 in the world and yet, energy poor. The country is the second highest in term of gas flaring after Russia. All across the Niger Delta, we continue to burn gas. In the last five years, we have burned gas equivalent of about $12.5billion. That is the very definition of waste.”
According to him, because 30 states of Nigeria are rich in gas, the future of a cleaner, safer and more reliable energy in the transportation sector can only be in the gas sector.
“So, when the president came in last year,” he recalled, “he felt it is not genuine that the country so blessed like us, should still be experiencing energy poverty.”
He bemoaned periodic fuel queues and shortages experienced in the country, coupled with what he described as massive smuggling of the fuel subsidized by the Nigerian government.
“The money that should have been spent on roads, hospital, and education,” he lamented, “was spent rather on subsidizing our neighbors, who then enjoyed cheap fuel to the detriment of Nigerians, who suffered poor infrastructure, because sufficient allocation of government resources dis not go to those things that matter.
‘’The government and the President said no, this is no longer tenable. We cannot continue to subsidize poverty, import unemployment and export jobs why we remain energy poor. To change the conversation, the President said it is time for Nigeria to depend on the natural gas that God blessed it with.”
While Oluwagbemi recognized federal government’s full commitment to the CNG program, he said Nigeria requires not less than 4000 refueling stations to effectively achieve the objectives of the programme.
“For workshop like Fixit45,” he explained,”we need at least 3,000 of them all across the country if we want to have this reliable, cheaper and cleaner future we are talking about. We need over 4,000 refueling stations.
“We require more than 400 to 500 major mother stations as well as LCNG plants to extend the current rate of CNG across the country. We need to invest in major transmission pipelines. We need to complete AKK which is about $4 billion project, which NNPC is currently building and other gas projects. We need to connect critical pipeline system to ensure gas move across Nigeria.
‘’Some of these are ongoing, while others have been completed to ensure that the country achieves its plan of having a million vehicles converted by 2027. So, we are excited to have the inauguration of the first CNG Training & Installation facility here in Lagos.”
Also speaking, the co-founder, Fixit45, Pankaj Bohhra stressed that his company, in collaboration with Mijo Autogas Pvt. Ltd, India, renowned CNG Kit manufacturers with credible reputation for excellence, is in Nigeria to promote innovative technology.
“Having been involved in automotive technology,” he pointed out, “the recent subsidy removal avail us an opportunity to bring Nigerian youth together so that they can get trained on CNG technology.”
According to him, CNG technology, when installed in vehicles would not only lead to operating cost reduction in the long run but would also drive youth employment generation.
“Since the Pi-CNG is very much active, we just thought we should be the pioneer of the initiative in Lagos,” Bohhra noted, adding, “This is the first facility in Lagos State. It is basically CNG conversion. That is what we are inaugurating today. We have completed two training program already in Lagos and Abuja.
“We have trained more than fifty youth from seven different states. And this is the official inauguration of the facility.
“We are currently operating in eleven cities in Nigeria. We work with more than 300 partners who have workshop in these cities across the country. Now that it has been inaugurated, we are going to bring more people on board, make them understand why it is important to use right technology that we process and then expand it so that the entire CNG installation can scale up. It is not only scaling, maintenance is also important,”
While commending the Nigerian government so far for their effort, Bohhra urged Pi-CNG to support the organization by sponsoring more Nigerian youth to benefit from the training and a subsidy on installation to Nigerians as a way of contributing to government’s plans to convert a million vehicles to CNG by 2027.
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