Oil and gas stakeholders were taken aback recently when Mr. Ben Van Beurden, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Royal Dutch Shell, said his next car, a Mercedes-Benz S500e, which will be delivered to him in September, will be an electric car. His declaration was an affirmation of the impending threat Nigeria’s oil and gas industry and the economy as a whole will face in the years ahead.
According to the Shell boss, “the whole move to electrify the economy, electrify mobility in places like northwest Europe, in the US, even in China, is a good thing. We need to be at a much higher degree of electric vehicle penetration – or hydrogen vehicles or gas vehicles – if we want to stay within the 2-degrees Celsius outcome,” he said.
His remarks came less than 72 hours after the United Kingdom said it will ban sale of diesel and gasoline-fuelled cars by 2040. Earlier, France had announced a similar plan to reduce air pollution and meet targets to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
This was even as a leading auto manufacturer, Volvo AB, said in July that it will manufacture only electric or hybrid vehicles from 2019, leading the drive for a cleaner global environment.
It is against this background that the declaration recently by the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, that Nigeria lost a whopping $300 billion to global shocks in crude oil supply chain and its attendant poor investment in the last three years, left keen followers of the oil and gas industry wondering what the government is actually doing to avoid being caught unawares. These were investment opportunities that would improved the countries revenue stream in the future.
For Nigeria, the challenges arising from widespread use of electric car technology appear more severe considering that oil still accounts for more than 70 per cent of the country’s foreign exchange earnings even as efforts to diversify the economy are yet to gather stream.
To avert the looming danger, Kachikwu had advised the country would need consistent policies that will deal with inefficiencies in the system to survive the trend.
According to him, some countries are already planning switching fully to electric cars in four years’ time warning that if Nigeria fails to transform rapidly, it would have wasted valuable time. (The Sun)
