Nigeria must use its oil wealth to
prepare for a future when the world no longer runs on fossil fuels,
Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo has said.
Osinbajo said on Thursday that the
country, a member of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries,
needed to develop renewable energy and help other businesses flourish to
“adjust to the reality of the dwindling significance of fossil fuels.”
“It is no longer a question of if but when,” Osinbajo said, referring to global efforts to shift away from oil as a fuel.
“Oil-rich countries, such as ourselves,
have an obligation to prepare for a destiny that may well be beyond
oil,” he told the Oil Producing Trade Section conference in Lagos,
according to Reuters.
The Federal Government has long talked
of diversifying the economy away from reliance on oil, but earnings from
output of crude still provide two-thirds of state revenue.
The vice-president called on oil and gas
majors in Nigeria, many of them represented in the audience, to invest
in renewable energy research and development to help the country prepare
for a “clean energy economy” and the “post-oil world.”
Osinbajo said the country needed to reduce bureaucratic bottlenecks in contract awards and approvals.
Osinbanjo said the Nigerian National
Petroleum Corporation was incurring higher cost to achieve stability in
petroleum products’ supply and distribution in the country.
The vice-president stated that the
upstream sector of the oil and gas industry was challenged by the menace
of asset vandalism last year, with oil output plunging to an almost
all-time low of one million barrels per day from a peak of over 2.3
million bpd recorded at the beginning of 2016.
He added that with the sustained
engagements with the Niger Delta, oil production had ramped up to about
2.1 million bpd from an average of about 1.8 million bpd last year.
According to him, petroleum products
supply and distribution to the nation is fairly stabilised since the May
2016 market liberalisation.
“However, with the prevailing change in
macroeconomic conditions, this is being achieved at higher costs,
especially to the NNPC as the supplier of the last resort. We continue
to channel more energy towards resolving our downstream issues, once and
for all,” Osinbajo said.
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