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Nigeria employs satellite to chase $1bn gas flaring fines

By on November 29, 2014

Nigeria has started using a satellite tracking system to help it bring in more than $1 billion a year in fines which it could charge for illegal gas flaring.

The new gas flare tracker is an online map showing data from a United States National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration satellite that will observe natural gas fires when orbiting over Nigeria. The measurements it records would feed into estimates of how much gas is burned, its carbon dioxide content and its potential value.

“It has the ability to calculate the amount of unpaid fines owed by facility owners, estimated at $1.1 billion per year,” the Minister of Environment, Laurentia Laraba Mallam, said yesterday at an event to unveil the system in the capital, Abuja. While it was outlawed in 1984, the burning of gas that occurs in oil deposits “is still a major cause of human and environmental issues across the country,” she said.

According to Bloomberg, the minister said if harnessed, gas could meet 40 per cent of energy needs in Nigeria.

Nigeria struggles to generate enough electricity to keep the lights on for more than two or three hours a day in some parts of the country.

The tracking system will paint a “stark picture of the extent of gas flaring in this country,” Andrew Pocock, British High Commissioner to Nigeria, said at the event. The UK’s Department for International Development provided funding for the project.

Nigeria is producing 1.8 million barrels a day of crude oil, 2.2 million barrels when condensate is included, the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke, told journalist yesterday before the start of a meeting of the 12-member Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries  (OPEC) in Vienna.

 

[ThisDay]