Nigeria has sufficient natural gas reserves and can increase its production to more than 5 billion cubic feet per day by 2030, Ekperikpe Ekpo, Nigeria’s minister of state for gas, told the Gastech conference on Tuesday in Singapore.

“In Nigeria, it has been declared a decade of gas from 2020 to 2030. So by 2030, we’ll get to 5.5 billion cubic feet on daily production (57 billion cubic meters a year),” Ekpo said, adding that there were funds available to finance expansion, without elaborating.

Nigeria’s gas output declined by nearly 11% from the previous year to 40.4 bcm in 2022, down from over 49 bcm a year in 2019 and 2020, according to industry body the Energy Institute.

The decline in output resulted in lower exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), which dropped by 16% to 19.6 bcm last year, the institute’s data shows, giving Nigeria less than a 4% share in global LNG exports.

Nigeria relies on fossil fuel exports for 90% of its foreign exchange and roughly half its budget.
Source: Reuters (Reporting by Aizhu Chen and Florence Tan; Writing by Katya Golubkova; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Tom Hogue)