Power generation suffers setback over gas supply

Gas supply needed to boost generation dropped to 17,464 million standard cubic feet (mmscf) within the last 24 days in March, as against 21,521 mmscf recorded in February.

Data from the Office of Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, indicated that last month, Nigeria’s privatised power sector lost a total of N44.38 billion revenue due to constraints which included shortage of gas; grid unreliability and distribution limitations.

The loss in March may likely fall within the same range as constrained revenue hovers at N39.45billion for the period under review.

The data obtained by The Guardian from the Advisory Power Team in Osinbajo’s office, showed that for this period, the average volume of electricity generated and distributed daily to Nigerian homes and offices was 4148 megawatts (MW) per day, while an average of 3161MW was constrained from getting to consumers by these limitations.

The industry data equally explained that the total volume of gas supplied by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to gas power generation plants in the country for the period has continued to drop by at least 24 per cent.

According to the data, Nigeria’s power sector attained a peak generation of about 5,198MW during the period.

Latest NNPC data showed that a total of 774mmscfd was delivered to gas fired power plants in the month of December 2018 to generate an average power of about 3,131MW compared with November 2018 where an average of 735mmscfd was supplied to generate 2,849MW.

Similarly, out of the 240.59 BCF of gas supplied in December 2018, a total of 151.13BCF of gas was commercialized consisting of 38.61BCF and 112.52BCF for the domestic and export market respectively.

This translates to a total supply of 1,245.48 mmscfd of gas to the domestic market and 3,748.47 mmscfd of gas supplied to the export market for the month.

This implies that 62.61% of the average daily gas produced was commercialized while the balance of 37.39% was re-injected, used as upstream fuel gas or flared.

Gas flare rate was 9.15% for the month under review i.e. 729.55mmscfd compared with average Gas flare rate of 9.92 % i.e. 777.37mmscfd for the period December 2017 to December 2018.

Egbin generated 410.96MW during the period as against its installed capacity of 1320MW, Kainji; 384.91, Azura-Edo IPP; 334.21MW, while ASCO and AES did not generate anything during the period.