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Chevron Nigeria Limited (CNL) says it has reduced its gas flaring by 98 per cent and is aiming to achieve a 100 per cent reduction within the next few years.
Speaking at a capacity-building programme organised by the company in Abuja, the Chief Corporate Affairs Officer and General Manager, Corporate Affairs, Chevron Nigeria Limited, Mr Shola Odushelu, said the company has three Escravos gas plants that capture gas for storage and reuse.
Odushelu, who was represented by the Communications Manager of CNL, Dr Victor Anyaegbudike, explained that the company has so far spent more than $10 billion supporting Nigerian companies and strengthening local capacity.
According to him, Chevron spends about $1 billion annually on local content and has invested more than $10 billion over the past 10 years in supporting local communities.
“Chevron has already started in local community content before Nigeria started in Nigerian content. Nigerian content came on board in 2010. Chevron started local community content in 1999. So, you can see that Chevron has already dreamt about local content before Nigeria even started the policy. So, what we do is that we have what we call the standard operating procedure for us to inject local community content in all the projects that we do in Chevron,” he noted.
Odushelu also said that more than $140 million has been paid to communities for community development projects in the Niger Delta region.
On the gas-to-liquids project, Chevron said it had 16,000 people working on the development of the project.
He further stated that the company recognises that host communities are the backbone of its operations and that, without them, CNL cannot operate effectively.
To this end, he said the company pioneered the Global Memorandum of Understanding in 2005.
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“That is the agreement that we had with communities before the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA). And what it helped us to do is to establish a community-led partnership for community development.
The communities were given the right and the training and the capacity for them to drive their own development while Chevron was on the background supporting them with funds.
“And it has helped us to build peace. It helps us to do a lot of projects in those communities. And then when we exited and went into the PIA, the Host Community Development Trust, we had several thousands of projects in the Niger Delta that you can say this is what Chevron has been able to do in those areas,” he said.
The Deputy Bureau Chief of The Guardian newspaper, Kingsley Jeremiah, who spoke on Data Accuracy in Energy Journalism, stressed that the energy sector is fundamentally driven by numbers and cautioned journalists against common statistical errors, such as confusing percentage increases with percentage-point changes, relying on outdated figures in fast-moving markets, and uncritically reproducing figures from government or corporate press releases without independent verification.
In another presentation on Artificial Intelligence in the Newsroom, the Editor-in-Chief of Forefront Magazine and Online News, Amos Dunia, told participants that AI has become indispensable to modern journalism but stressed that it remains a tool to support, rather than replace, human judgement.
He warned that AI-generated content must be verified and cross-checked, given its potential for both accuracy and misuse.
Earlier, the Chairman of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Council, Comrade Grace Ike, welcomed participants and described the training as an investment in accuracy, context and credibility.
She urged journalists to prioritise verification over speed and independent inquiry over convenience, while commending Chevron for its continued support of journalism training initiatives in Nigeria.
