The company’s Managing Director, Ritu Sahajwalla, who disclosed this at the inauguration of one of the LNG plants at Dufil Prima Foods Plc, in Port Harcourt, River State explained that the company plans to get gas to the 250-megawatt plant through transportation by their LNG trucks since there are no pipelines yet, adding that the content of each truck is equivalent to the generation of five megawatts.
According to her, the kickoff would depend on the completion of the power plant itself, which the company is looking forward to soon, as installation of civil works would commence in 10 days.
The northern part of the country, she noted, can have about 200 megawatts in six months with the pace of work.“We all know the North has been cut off, but before pipelines are laid, power plants have to be supplied by LNG trucks while construction of facilities is underway”, she added.She told The Guardian that the company is aware of the security issues in the region and have been coping with it as operations and investments have not been affected.
Meanwhile, Sahajwalla regretted how expensive it is in Nigeria to put up new structures since there are no existing ones, saying often, they bear the cost, citing that of the Dufil Prima project.
In his remarks, the Head of Operations, Dufil Prima Plc, Virenver Pethenia expressed optimism that switching to LNG from Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) would be worthwhile.He acknowledged that even though the company still had contracts with some CNG companies, it hopes to switch fully once the supply is assured because LNG is easier to transport and store.“We hope to save a lot once fully on LNG because the CNG was much difficult to transport,” he added.
The Greenville MD, however, described the LNG trucks as the future and that there are 300 trucks in circulation already and they seek to inject 5,000 more trucks into the system in the next one year, “but for now, we are doing conversion kits for vehicles and educating people for better acceptance”.