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By Chinelo Obogo
Director–General, Nigeria Mining Cadastre Office (NMCO) Obadiah Nkom, has said Nigeria spent $13 million on bitumen importaton in 2020.
Nkom made this known at a round table at the ongoing three -day Nigeria-Africa Natural Resources and Energy Investment Summit on Thursday in Abuja.
According to him, Nigeria is blessed with 42.74 billion metric tonnes of bitumen reserve yet untapped, located in Ogun, Ondo, Delta, Rivers and Bayelsa.
He said that currently the global market for bitumen is $42 billion, but that the market could increase to $66 billion by 2027 due to its high demand. “This shows that there will be rise in the value of bitumen market by 2027 which is why Nigeria should look into bitumen exploration that will bring development to the country.
“Nigeria can conserve its foreign exchange when it starts exploration on the mineral and this will bring a boost to our economy.
Nigeria is ranked 6th in global bitumen deposit as demand for the mineral in Nigeria is high due high road construction.
Nigeria has more than 160, 000 kilometres of roads to be tared while only 60,000 are already tared,” he said.
Also, spaeaking, Dr Abdulrazaq Garba, the Director-General, Nigerian Geological Survey Agency (NGSA) said that the government had identified seven strategic minerals based on the information available on them.
The seven minerals are Coal, Iron Ore, Bitumen, Gold, Limestone, Lead/Zinc and Barite.
Garba said that the government had invested funds in generating Geoscience data for those minerals to enable investors to have adequate knowledge about them.
“Basically, you will agree with me that the business of mining is not meant for government to do investigation on minerals, but in this our particular climate, we need to take this information up to a particular level whereby the minerals will be attractive to investors.
Meanwhile, the total value of capital importation into Nigeria in Q1 2022 stood at US$1,573.14 million from US$2,187.63 million in the preceding quarter, the National Bureau of Statistics has said.
In a newly released data on Thursday, NBS said the figure shows a decrease of 28.09 per cent compared to last year. When compared to the corresponding quarter of 2021, capital importation decreased by 17.46 per cent from US$1,905.89 million. The largest amount of capital importation by type was received through Portfolio Investment, which accounted for 60.87 per cent ($957.58 million). This was followed by Other Investment with 29.28 per cent (US$460.59 million) and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) accounted for 9.85 per cent ($154.97 million) of total capital imported in Q1 2022.
