Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. Wednesday said it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with a consortium of Chinese companies to build biofuel plants in Nigeria that will blend fuel ethanol with gasoline to boost the supply of clean fuel in the West African country.
The agreement, signed on the sidelines of the ongoing Forum for China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) Summit, involved two separate MOUs aimed at increasing the number of biofuel projects being developed in Nigeria to three, NNPC said in a statement.
Chinese firms China National Complete Plant Import Export Corp. (Complant) and Nanning will team up with two Nigerian companies to develop the biofuel complex, which is set to take off before the end of the year, NNPC said. “The aspiration for the exploitation of renewable fuel resources in Nigeria is to implement our nationally determined contributions to the Paris Agreement; part of which requires the blending of 10% by volume of fuel-ethanol in gasoline and 20% by volume of biodiesel in automotive gas oil (diesel) for use in the transportation sector,” NNPC Group Managing Director Maikanti Baru was quoted saying in the statement.
Baru said that, with Nigeria’s daily consumption of over 65 million liters of fossil fuels, the country would require enormous volumes of fuel ethanol and biodiesel to meet the clean fuel obligation. Nigeria along with four other West African countries — Benin, Togo, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire — agreed late in 2016 to ban imports of high-sulfur petroleum products as part of an initiative organized by the UN Environment Programme.
However, Nigeria has so far struggled to reduce the sulfur content of its gasoline from around 1,000 ppm down to 150 ppm, even though it had previously fixed July 1, 2017 as the implementation date. NNPC said earlier this year that it now hopes to reduce the sulfur content in its gasoline imports by October 2019. S&P Platts
Pix: NNPC Headquarters, Abuja
