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By Adewale Sanyaolu and Chinelo Obogo
As the campaign towards zero carbon emission by 2050 gathers traction, the African Petroleum Producers’ Organisation (APPO) has alleged that the move to shift focus away from fossil fuel was a ploy by the other part of the world to push Africa below the poverty net.
Secretary General of APPO, Dr. Omar Ibrahim, stated this at the maiden edition of the African Local Content Investment Forum organised by the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board held in Lagos yesterday, with the theme:‘ “Evolving A Pan-African Strategy Towards Sustainable Funding of Africa Oil and Gas Projects.”
Omar lamented that Africa has just come to the full realisation that the world, or more precisely, that part of the world that Africa has depended on for over three quarters of a century for hydrocarbon technology, expertise, markets and funding, has now resolved to abandon hydrocarbons and by implication, the mainstay of many of the economies of Africa’s oil and gas producing countries.
He said it was important not to de-link the global paradigm shift away from fossil fuels to renewables from the failure of the doctrine of project independence, initiated by President Richard Nixon of the United States in 1973. The initiative was aimed at ending US oil imports in response to the oil embargo placed on the US and some European countries by some Arab oil producing countries, in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli war of the same year.
Omar said the bitter experience of the US from the oil embargo made it to resolve to wean itself from foreign, particularly Arab oil. The US Government, he said introduced policies aimed at achieving this objective, among which was support for the development of shale oil.
‘‘For a number of reasons, these policies did not achieve the desired results. It was the failure to achieve that objective that led to a change in strategy. Now that their economies have graduated from reliance on intensive energy for production, and Africa is on the verge of its industrialisation, these countries have suddenly remembered that fossil fuels are harmful to humankind.”
On the way out of the logjam, he said NCDMB under the able leadership of of its Executive Secretary, Mr. Simbi Wabote, has been taking steps for close to six years at changing the predicament Nigeria has found ourselves in.
The APPO scribe equally pointed point out that a major study commissioned by APPO on the Future of the Oil and Gas Industry in Africa in the Light of the Energy Transition has concluded that the oil and gas industry in Africa shall need a new development model in order to survive the energy transition, saying if it fails to re-strategise and come up with a new model, it risks losing the 125 billion proven crude oil reserves and the hundreds of trillions of proven gas reserves as stranded assets.
