The chairman of the Presidential Initiative on Compressed Natural Gas and Electric Vehicles (PI-CNG&EV), Barr. Ismael Ahmed, says the initiative will lobby the Federal Government to adopt a policy requiring all commercial vehicles to run on natural gas or electricity.
Ahmed made the disclosure in an interview on Arise News TV, where he discussed the government’s alternative-fuel programme and plans to extend it nationwide.
“We are going to try and convince the government to make a policy that all commercial vehicles should convert to natural gas or electric vehicles so that people would move cleaner. Certainly cheaper. It will be affordable,” he said.
He also tied the proposal to Nigeria’s oil earnings. “Let’s sell our oil to the foreigners and earn money for it,” Ahmed said.
He said Nigeria has about 12 million vehicles, with 55 to 60 per cent of them commercial, which makes that segment central to any nationwide switch. He added that the focus has moved from proving that the technology works to deploying it at scale.
Ahmed said the programme has already lowered fares on some routes in Lagos, Abuja, Kaduna, Kano, Ebonyi and Maiduguri, though the savings have not yet reached passengers widely enough. He also pointed to Nigeria’s estimated 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves and said the country has the technology to compress the gas for transport use.
The federal government is targeting the conversion of one million commercial petrol vehicles to CNG by 2027. About 120,000 had been converted as of the latest figures on the PI-CNG&EV website, and the initiative has attracted more than $2.5 billion in investment.
The Midstream and Downstream Gas Infrastructure Fund is financing over 100 gas projects, including 15 CNG mother stations and 86 daughter stations. The government plans to add 500 refuelling stations to the 500 already ordered, bringing the planned national network to 1,000.
President Bola Tinubu had said state governments agreed to use the lower operating costs of CNG and electric buses to support fare reductions from October 1.