Nigeria will award contracts for its burned fuel until the end of December as part of an accelerated program to exploit the released fuel as a byproduct of oil production, its oil regulator announced.
President Muhammadu Buhari first introduced the auction rights program to capture and sell burned fuel in 2016. Four years later, the government approved two hundred bidders, but the procedure stalled due to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.
On Sunday, the director general of Nigeria’s Upstream Oil Regulatory Commission, Gbenga Komolafe, said the auction would restart and be open to old and new bidders.
“The auction procedure was simplified to allow for an expedited delivery schedule for this fiscal year with the announcement of winners scheduled for December 2022,” Komolafe said in a statement.
The government said the burning costs about $1 billion a year in lost revenue. The gas can be used in power plants, in industry or exported.
Last month, Oil Minister Timipre Sylva said Nigeria’s plan to market fuel burned from its oil fields at a complex level and help reduce carbon emissions from the environment by 15 million tonnes.
Nigeria, which has Africa’s largest fuel reserves at more than 190 trillion cubic feet, first targeted fuel burning in the late 1970s and, through systems and regulations, has more than halved it since 2001.