By Marcus Mejebi, in Maputo

The Government of Mozambique has decided to extend, by four and a half years, the concession period for Area 1 of the deepwater Rovuma Basin, which hosts the liquefied natural gas (LNG) megaproject.

The extension was approved in a resolution by Mozambique’s  Council of Ministers, on November18, 2025 “in accordance with current regulations, establishes the reinstatement of the suspended period of the LNG project due to ‘force majeure,’ ensuring the recalculation of the 30-year development period and preserving, under the law, the elements of the original development plan.”

The tenor of the extension is less than half the time requested by TOTALEnergies, operator of both the licence and the 13Million Tonne Per Annum LNG project in the Cabo Delgado province in the north of the country.

TOTAL included the request for extension as part of the proposal for compensation for losses accumulated during the four-year forced suspension of activities, which the company estimated at $4.5Billion.

The European energy giant had invoked the “force majeure” in April 2021 after terrorist attacks in the Palma town, near the project site had led to loss of scores of lives. TOTAL lifted the “force majeure” in October 2025.

TOTAL had argued that an extension of the Development and Production Period for the Golfinho-Atum field by an additional 10 years, would “partially compensate for the economic impact” caused by the prolonged operational interruption.

The Mozambican government pledged, in response to TOTAL’s request, to provide the necessary institutional and decision-making support to enable an orderly and efficient resumption of activities ensuring the immediate restart of the project.

The resolution by the Council of Ministers also sets out the “need to evaluate all expenses incurred during the ‘force majeure’ period with technical rigour and transparency, ensuring protection of the public interest and contractual predictability through an independent audit, including the right to appeal, before approval of the final report.”

The French major had announced, as far back as first quarter 2025 that security conditions were “now sufficient for the full resumption of the Mozambique LNG project.

John Bentley was the only private sector operative invited to the podium to address the gathering at the INVEST IN ZIMBABWE session at the Africa Energy Week in Cape Town in late September 2025.

The chairman of the board of Invictus Energy, a junior Australian explorer, spoke very briefly on the healthy cooperation between the company, the state and the community and the potentials for shared prosperity on account of the “discovery” of commercial sized natural gas accumulation in the onshore Cabora Bassa Basin in the southern African country.

Other speakers, led by the country’s energy minister July Gabarari Moyo, whose speech dominated the outing, were all officials of the government.

The company’ claims so far, about a natural gas accumulation, have been foggy.

In early December 2023, when it declared a natural gas discovery on the Mukuyu structure in the course of drilling the Mukuyu-2 sidetrack, citing it as “one of the most significant developments in the onshore Southern Africa oil and gas industry for decades”, Invictus said it came to that conclusion through indications from real-time logging while drilling and mudgas.

“A limited suite of wireline logging data,  acquired over the interval from 1,969metre Measured Depth (MD) to 2,975mMD, in the Basal Pebbly Arkose and Upper Angwa formations, identified multiple hydrocarbon bearing reservoirs in the Upper Angwa. A total of four hydrocarbon samples were recovered to surface from two separate zones in the Upper Angwa using the wireline formation testing tool”

Huh.

Apache’s Egypt gas output increased to a two-year high, to 470Milion standard cubic feet per day (MMscf/d) in Q2, 2025 as the company takes advantage of the incentive to develop previously overlooked gas deposits.

It’s the American independent’s second consecutive quarterly gas output increase for the first time in twelve years. Gas output was up 5% quarter-on-quarter and 11% year-on-year to a two-year high but that figure remains 48% below the peak of 921MMscf/d reached in the first quarter of 2014.

The new increase is also unable to help Egypt turn the tide from a declining natural gas producer.

Felix Ekundayo, President of the Nigeria Liquefied and Compressed Gases Association (NLCGA), has strong opinions about the country’s ‘Decade of Gas’ programme; the drive for gas demand expansion; why the CNG policy is a slow-coach option for the country; Dangote’s entry into the gas market and ensuring energy supply security by not allowing any single gas provider to control more than 15 percent of market share. 

He says, “You don’t want to have such sudden infusion of a large volume of gas when you’ve got other investments. They will die out.” He adds that the risk to the country is when the single large producer suddenly “switches off tomorrow for whatever reason,” leading to a return to imports.

Ekundayo’s company, ‘Asiko Energy Ltd’, is building Nigeria’s first tri-fuel gas terminal, to handle 1.8Million tonnes (annual) of LPG (Butane), Propane and LNG. The managing director, who has  30 plus years industry experience, estimates that the terminal will be ready December 2025.

 In this open conversation with Africa Oil +Gas” s FOLUSO OGUNSAN and AKPELU PAUL KELECHi, Ekundayo explains his gas opinions, his hopes and fears for the gas sector and why the new Petroleum refineries are displacing gas importers. He also advocates that the Petroleum Industry Act is past-due for amendment and opens up on the challenges that Asiko Energy has faced in its mega gas terminal project, including drilling a subterranean, sub-zero degree pipeline for LNG.

Transcript by FOLUSO OGUNSAN

Africa Oil+Gas Report: At the last Nigeria International Energy Summit (NIES) in February 2025, you stated that the demand for Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) did not increase in 2024, contrary to what the trend in 2023 was. The question is: was the demand less in 2024 than the 1.3Million tonnes per year declared for 2023?

Felix Ekundayo: What we had been seeing was a 20% jump year-on-year for the last fifteen if not seventeen years we had been seeing a 20% increase aggregate. That kind of came to a halt in 2022 [with]    a slight decline due to policy missteps that happened. Some of it had to do with VAT and other missteps – the ability of customers to bring in product which then leads to a price incline. So,    2023 was a decline. 2024 was not a recovery,   it was flattening out.

We are hoping that 2025 will see a recovery of some sort. But the ability of the consumer to pay has also been affected; the situation at the moment is we’re not entirely sure what would pan out. The saving grace when we look at the data that is available   is that with the refinery coming on line, while some parts of the industry has gone down, on the supply side, supply locally has pushed up. But the consumer wants to see lower prices. Whilst lower prices are coming now, the consumer has suddenly not become able to afford it.

You also hinted at a lack of stimulation of demand, can you provide more details?

I didn’t go into details because it’s not something you can address in a panel. How do you stimulate demand? Someone has to decide who’s the biggest beneficiary? You could say you’re doing it for the consumer, because that’s what everybody says. it’s a social programme. In one sense, you stop deforestation. In another sense, you stop health issues. Then you end up with situation where you say if I stimulate demand and I consume more gas locally, it also benefits because I get all these multiplier effects- health, environment etc. So that case says it’s a government-driven programme.

What can the government do to stimulate demand? You need to be able to reduce the entry cost for the consumer.  You need infrastructure to be able to consume gas. So if the government says I will assist you to share that cost in whatever formula, that is demand-stimulation.

“What are the lowest hanging opportunities in the “alternative–to PMS/Diesel Market” if you were to advise a new-comer?

In PMS, I’d say it’s the displacement of Keke Napep. It’s the easiest thing to handle, however it must be done from a technically savvy point of view. You don’t want just anybody to handle it. That’s not going to work, it will create more damage. So, we want people to go in and be able to convert Keke Napep safely or buy them new safely. However even if you buy a new one, you have to be able to maintain and operate safely. So that’s the lowest hanging fruit but it has qualifications.”

There was a ten-million cylinder programme by the Office of The Vice President in the previous administration, do you have any idea of the current status of that programme?

To the best of my knowledge, there was counterparty funding available. Now where counterparty funding is available and your funding is not, the programme is not going to move forward. A lot of work was done to ignite that programme. For whatever reason(s), they were not able to ignite it. The current administration could have carried on or terminated and gone to another programme,  Are we going to stimulate demand at all? There needs to be clarity on that.

That ten million cylinders, that’s a million tons per year. That is 60% increase on what we said the market was before. The knock-on effects are important. The guys who are manufacturing the cylinders will open more factories. They will use more gas domestically. There’re also other areas where you might decide to say people make valves here, they will refurbish more cylinders here. It stimulates the industry. So demand stimulation is not just on the gas side, it’s on the supply chain side too.

As at last year 2024, was there any inkling of that happening?

At the moment, we have the Decade of Gas Initiatives where they go out and say they want to do cylinder programmes. So, if you want to do 10 million cylinders and you go through every local government, for sake of argument, that is 774 local governments multiplied by a thousand cylinders per programme, it’s still less than a million. So, those programmes are awareness building at best.

A concerted programme will be government saying we have the resource to put to this particular demand-stimulation. So whether it’s picking up where the old administration left off, whether it’s picking a new system, it needs to be decided on.

“CNG, you use it in trucks, you use it in cars in a defined geographical area. Propane LPG you use it in tricycles which also CNG can do, but I wager that the tricycle owner that is given the opportunity of not coming to refuel four times as often will go Propane. He could also go LNG but he’s not going to because why going to spend money for Rolls Royce equipment when all he needs is a simple equipment. So if I was making that, I would say targeting tricycles would be more the LPG and there’s much more LPG infrastructure across the country then there is CNG or LNG.”

The NLPGA has plans on “how to adopt propane and how to distribute cylinders in rural areas” you said in 2024. “The product can be absorbed but there is a lot of work still needed to get us to that stage” you added. Can you outline a little, what that work entails?

Firstly, the association’s name now is Nigeria Liquefied and Compressed Gases Association (NLCGA). The old name was Nigerian Liquefied and Petroleum Gases Association (NLPGA). NLCGA mandate covers LPG, Propane and CNG. You need a programme for every kind of fuel. The common man is engaged enough to say what do you mean oil, are you talking diesel, petrol, kerosene etc.  Gas is not yet there for the gas side. Everybody says gas is gas.

CNG has its uses [and market], it overlaps sometimes with the propane [market]. So, we need to create specific policies that are complementary, not divergent; complimentary as to how all these gases will be used together, because I can’t build a refinery to only give me kerosene. Therefore, I can’t build a policy that is just for one of those and not for all of them.

The government is promoting CNG at the moment. The limitations of CNG are geographical because its energy density is not that much. You can’t go beyond say Lokoja for example on a full truck of CNG. A full truck of LNG may go to Kano. With CNG you need infrastructure along the way. If you have to stop three, four times to make the journey that one truck can make, there’re consequences on overall cost, timeline to delivery, efficiency and all of those things.  As NLCGA we say by the time you get to the North that is tricycle-based, then it’s more propane. You can get more energy in that and the guy who’s riding the tricycle doesn’t want to come back to you four times in a day when he should only come back to you once. He’s losing revenue and he’s taking a lot more cost coming back and forth for refuel.  Policy should address the marriage of these three products.

With that in mind, NNPCL did Compressed Gas in Kogi State, where they were supposed to have five plants?

Oh That!  it’s LNG, that ground-breaking. So they’re making Liquefied Natural Gas not Compressed Natural Gas. So they were ground-breaking for Liquefied Natural Gas.  To get the same energy content across, I need four trucks of CNG for one truck of LNG. Let’s say that my customer is right outside my gate, using random numbers, the unit cost of LNG is 2 and the unit cost of CNG is 1. So the LNG has cost me 2 and five of the CNG has cost me 1 which 0.2, I’m outside the gate, for the same amount of energy, I’ve not employed anyone, nor driven the truck, which would you choose?

“Dangote comes in (into LPG), he’s 50% of the market. Dangote switches off tomorrow for whatever reason, 50% is gone. How long will it take to get ships in? That’s where security of energy supply starts to come in. So when you put the security of supply hat on, you know what 50% is. It sounds like it’s good, but it also brings its own risk with it. So, we didn’t do 15%, we actually did better. But it gave me a different concern.”

LNG should be cheaper because you’re just using one truck.

Yes, but I’m saying I haven’t moved left the factory gate. The entire volume of CNG cost me 1 while the LNG cost 2. So my choice for somebody located close to CNG is always going to be CNG. It’s half the price of LNG.

Now we’re going to do another experiment, we’re going to say I’ve had to employ drivers and I’m now going to move this a thousand kilometres away, and it costs me one Naira additional to move it away. So LNG becomes 2+N1 while the CNG will cost 1+N5 because 0.2 makes 1 truck and I’ve got 5 trucks to move . So 6 for CNG while 3 for LNG, my dynamics change completely and I’m still talking the same, it’s not even a different family of product, it’s the same family of product, one is just the gas, the other is the liquid. Liquefied natural gas, compressed natural gas.

The energy density with CNG is lower, but if I don’t have to go far, it is my compelling case. If I have to go far, at some point in time, the balance shifts and LNG comes into play. That’s what we’ve been arguing that, yes, it is good to build awareness and everybody is engaged in CNG, LNG. LPG, propane discussion, now to get to the nitty-gritty, what is better to put in Gombe as opposed to Benin may not be the same thing, but they still achieve the same objective. I’m using the same resource, just a different part of that resource.

So if the government wants to localise like you said, within a geographical location for one product?

It’s not necessarily a government intervention that I am advocating. I want to get away from that. If I’m talking stimulation of LPG, that’s a government intervention because the social benefits accrue to the state. Here, it’s a commercial decision. The people who are buying ultimately [ will use it for] transport or generators.

These are my three products: CNG, LNG, LPG. If I can use them to displace something that I was bringing in before, it makes a lot of sense. The argument is now going to be  like you now have Dangote; you have all the products that you were importing before. Is he able to supply the entire diesel for the country’s needs? If he’s not then there’s still room for displacement or there’s room to grow. How will that happen? We’re not really saying the government must do everything, no government has that kind of resources. All we’re saying is that within that space, we can stimulate demand in a different way. If we put a facility in the north, if we put a CNG or LNG facility in the North, it’s our cost, but there’re no trucks to pick it up because there’re no trucks in the country. The way policy in other places would work is we see this, we’re projecting it in the future, diesel trucks will attract “xyz” tariffs, gas trucks, we’ll clear it like that. So you’re bringing up the population of gas trucks because you’re trying to achieve an objective.

They’ve done that on the LPG side, they’ve done it on the CNG side.  If you go to them to ask for the Aidex waivers, you will get it. But the administering of it through different layers can be complex, but you will get it. Ease of doing business essentially, so that we don’t always have to have this situation of engaging consultants. You can’t grow at an exponential rate if you’re expecting the GDP to grow at double digits and you’re achieving 1.5%, 2%. The reasons are it’s very sticky to do business. So it doesn’t need government to spend money it simply just means let industry utilise its money better and on a much shorter timeframe.

Is this part of what Nigerian Liquefied and Compressed Gases Association (NLCGA) is championing as an association?

The reasons we went through that move is to remove, the question when you walked in the room was always which one are you representing? So to take that question off the table, we’re all pointing in the same direction. We represent everybody that is doing gas in whatever form.

You were making a case for Autogas Schemes. The subsidy was still in place and the PiCNG Initiative hadn’t begun.  

The case still exists. So whether there was a subsidy or no subsidy, all that subsidy would do is depress the market for the case.  If you’re subsidizing gasoline, you’re making it cheaper than gas, so I can’t roll out my gas. So it didn’t make sense. I’ll make a case again, I’ve got gas locally, let’s call it $100 dollars per unit. My gasoline costs $500 dollars but I subsidize it to $50. It looks like a differential of $50, but it’s actually a differential of $450 . It didn’t make sense. Consumers were not demanding cheap petrol, that I’d argue with anybody. They were demanding cheap energy. So I didn’t need to do $500 and subsidize it to $50, what I needed to do was put some hard effort promoting my $100 and pushing it into the market, which is what PiCNG objective is. PiCNG objective could be broader in terms of now says its LNG and LPG. Those are the two that are not spoken about in the name. But whether the mandate is broader, I haven’t really dived into it. I’m simply going on what the name says Presidential Initiative on Compressed Natural Gas, so you would assume that the focus is on CNG, but the mandate could be broader and those two components are within, that works perfectly for us, because then we’re all singing the same tune.

What are the opportunities and challenges you see in the implementation of the CNG Initiative? Are there plans for an autogas scheme directed at LPG in cars?

I’m going to talk about oopportunities I see in gas deployment into transport.  CNG, you use it in trucks, you use it in cars in a defined geographical area. Propane LPG you use it in tricycles which also CNG can do, but I wager that the tricycle owner that is given the opportunity of not coming to refuel four times as often will go propane. He could also go LNG but he’s not going to because why going to spend money for Rolls Royce equipment when all he needs is a simple equipment. So if I was making that, I would say targeting tricycles would be more the LPG and there’s much more LPG infrastructure across the country then there is CNG or LNG.

Then I go the next level, long-distance trucks, LNG. It just makes sense. It has the advantage, it’s a natural gas same natural gas so it has the same benefit as CNG, but I don’t have to stop as often so from an efficiency point of view, my transport chain works a lot better and I’ll displace diesel. Finally you say other industrials, then it’s a mix of all of those.

Once I have sorted out the transport market and I have segmented it and I have addressed each kind of category, then I am done. We actually put out a number of infographics last year and the year before how we will target, so It’s like a matrix, these different fuels and these different transport categories, what would we use, which fuel would we use and I think that is probably still valid.

You did say there’s more infrastructure in the country for LPG than CNG.

LPG has been actively promoted and deregulated for well over 20 years. So 20 years to two years of development is quite different. So people are already invested in that. The good news is firstly it has de-mystified gas to a certain extent. People are more enlightened. LPG helped pave the way for natural gas LNG or CNG. It has demystified it, you can easily upgrade or augment that infrastructure so that you can add all these other components to it. And therefore it reduces your time to deployment and your cost of deployment. It also therefore means when you substitute, which will happen, we’re not saying stick with LPG, you can eventually substitute one out for the other. Use LPG to start, use LNG to substitute, use electricity if you’re a much more advanced economy. Those are the steps. So there’s more infrastructure, it’s incontrovertible, that can also be leveraged for faster roll-out.

Mrs Olu Verheijen, President Tinubu’s Special Adviser on Energy is concerned that investors are not as excited in taking advantage of the government’s incentives for LPG business as they are for CNG.

The data where she has had facts for, we can corroborate with anecdotal evidence, because we get at our conferences, at informal chats, people come and present the problem to you and you say there’re incentives in place. They say they don’t know about it.

Even as NLCGA, we instituted a situation where we hired a consultant that could benefit our members and non-members. So the non-members may not know so we don’t cover everybody in the LPG space. So it could be our non-members that are going to go blind into the market and say they’re going to import cargoes and then they get hit with all these issues. For our members, we brought in a consultant who has demonstrated capacity to not only secure Aidex but to effect its use which are two completely different things in Nigeria. You need to take advantage of that.

The problem for non-members is clear, they don’t know, they don’t have access to the information. The problem for members is do they read the information we put out? If they read it, do they action it? If they action it, do they close on it? That closure on it sometimes can be for a finicky detail, and that finicky detail is cost.

I have a situation I want to import a million dollars of equipment, I don’t know my duty is 200,000  dollars which in today’s money is 320Million Naira. I don’t know, I simply think I’m going to wing it when it comes through. We’re going to talk to the boys or the girls, whatever it takes. So you go ahead and you do it, when you had the opportunity to and you spoke with a consultant who says they will charge you five million, 10Million Naira, that decision sometimes is made on the basis of 10 million Naira. Then when you get hit with 320Million Naira, you can’t run back, it’s too late. At that point in time, you’re stuck you have to pay it. They now say Ah! But we didn’t know! But we did say it. So it’s very difficult sometimes to persuade ourselves as Nigerians, about the value of spending for future benefits. We’re very much about immediate gratifications. If I don’t see what my 10Million is going to do, I’d rather just find out. By the time you find out, it will cost you a lot more. Yes, the bigger players who are going in for, maybe the transaction size is ten million, at that time the cost for you is going to be 3.2Billion  Naira, you will then say now I need a consultant, I don’t want the risk of doing that. The LPG space, perhaps they might think they’re too small to be impacted or the consultant’s fees are too high, I don’t know. But we have had to say to people who were already in it, that you should have gone this way it would have been better.

So,  your members that are enlightened are the ones generating this $700 million in context?

No! I’m saying that the way I read and heard what you said, is that from the data they have, there’s a gazette they have that says that you can get natural gas LNG, CNG,LPG equipment with waivers. However the letters they’re writing are predominantly CNG or CNG and LNG, that’s what I’m reading from what you’ve said. She’s saying the majority of what she’s seeing are not LPG.

Why did you choose to bring gas production for energy delivery under one body?

It’s easier. There’s no conversation you want to have on gas that you will not complete within NLCGA.  So, why do we need multiple interaction points? You don’t want to confuse government by coming and they ask which gas are you?

We’re not ideally where we’re supposed to be, but we actually work better with  other associations that cover those spaces. For example, with the Association of Local Distributors of Gas (ALDG) we’re philosophically aligned. NALPGAM is a very limited association in terms of scope. The name says it, the National Association of LPG Marketers, that’s how it started. And it was actually directed at the plant owners.

How did NLPGA get formed? NLPGA was formed out of the study the World Bank and a Nigerian consultant Nexcent did way back pre-2005 under Obasanjo’s regime. One of the conclusions was that you have too many voices. You have the transporters, you have the retailers on the street, you have the plant owners, it was fragmented and you have the producers. You don’t want to have these numbers of peoples talking to a government, they don’t have the time. Come under an umbrella. So LCCI actually drove the programme, NALPGAM came together, NALPGAM actually had to be dragged to the table to say let’s have a unified voice to create an umbrella body which we’re all part of.

What about the Nigerian Gas Association (NGA)?

Good! So now, that is a body that I would say we classify ourselves as followers. We talk about very similar things. NGA tends to work more with the producers. Let’s get the gas out of the ground and create policies that work getting the gas out of the ground. Where we come in is: what are we going to do with it once it’s out of the ground? It’s not divergent, it’s overlapping. We work very well with the NGA; we actually don’t have any conflict of that sort.

So you’re basically the commercial part of gas distribution, the midstream?

I would say  we do midstream-downstream.

There has been quite some misgivings about low increase in gas processing facility to bolster in-country LPG production. Over a year ago, you told Argus Media that you expected an expansion of a large plant in Kwale to be ready by the second quarter 2024. And also a new plant on the Assa North-Ohaji South (ANOH) fields to open in the third or fourth quarter. The volume of LPG to come out of these two was expected to be roughly 20%-25% of consumption in Nigeria. What’s the story with the Kwale plant? 

ANOH is a gas processing plant and out of that gas processing plant, they need to evacuate Dry Gas via pipelines and liquid gas via trucks. The evacuation they’re talking about is Dry gas. The Dry Gas needs to be evacuated, but they can’t get across the River Niger with the pipeline to deliver the gas. Now what am I going to do, why am I going to make gas to flare 90% of it because I want to sell LPG, it doesn’t make sense. That’s the qualification on ANOH. The plant is ready, until the pipeline is ready for the Dry Gas evacuation, they can’t do both. That is the OB3 Pipeline. That is not our shout, that is not their fault, it is a construction delay on what was a critical item. That is what the ANOH MD was saying.

Kwale the second plant is up and running. It may have been delayed, but it’s up and running. It’s up and running and it’s slightly bigger than the first. They did deliver the 10-15%, but guess what, Dangote comes up and he’s doing 40-50% of the market. That’s not significant, it’s going to sound odd the way I’m going to put it, it’s monumental bordering on disastrous.

Explain, please.

You don’t want to have such sudden infusion of a large volume of gas when you’ve got others in place; investments and so on. They will die out. There’re consequential fallouts. For us, one of the things we try to predict and do is to say if I am projecting forward, I don’t ever want a producer to come in that is more than a quarter of the market. It may sound like it’s a good thing when they come on, but you also have to think of the downside, what if they switch off?

So, Dangote comes in, he’s 50% of the market. Dangote switches off tomorrow for whatever reason, 50% is gone. How long will it take to get ships in? That’s where security of energy supply starts to come in. So when you put the security of supply hat on, you know what 50% it sounds like it’s good, but it also brings its own risk with it. So, we didn’t do 15%, we actually did better. But it gave me a different concern.

What was the concern?

Security of supply!

But if you did better, that means you can ensure more into the market.

Well No! We did better in terms of local supply. What it then gave us was to displace a lot of people who had invested in terminals.

What about the importers, people who receive imported products?

The Coastal. The Coastal is broken into imported and local. We’ve classified three fundamental types of supply. There’s Refinery, there’s the gas producers, Inland and then there’s the Coastal. Coastal can be supplied by ships, but it could come from a refinery or a gas producer offshore. That same Coastal takes a gas producer locally- NLNG, Mobil (Oso)-now Seplat, Chevron and so on. (Showing a diagram on a tablet) This here is refinery volume, this is here is gas producers and this here is Coastal. That’s the first thing to paint. Second thing to paint is this Green says what I’m doing this year. (In a speedometer design)Yellow line says what I did for the same period last year. Red says what I did for the whole period last year. So if I’m going to interprete it, am I ahead or am I behind?

So, the green is behind the yellow. You’re behind. So that has pushed out Coastal.  On Inland producers?

The difference is slight.

The effect of the new production coming in is not as much as what happened last year. Refinery?

It’s off the charts. I want to set it to the end of this year; however there’s no data. So the refinery by now is not more than what it did last year because the refinery came in towards the back end of last year. So it’s already pumping in more. Of course that’s going to affect other people. This is almost half-year, we’re one-third. We’re nowhere near one-third (pointing to screen) so these guys who have invested, what are they going to do?

The refinery is going to displace them, they’re going to run at a loss.

It has displaced them. They’ve been running at a loss since the refinery switched on. But it’s not good for you to send those kinds of signals out in any economy where people who’ve put in all these waivers that we spoke about earlier, the ones that went to LPG, the waivers have been useful to construct things that are no longer used, it’s of no benefit. So security of supply planning-wise, it’s not a good idea to have somebody who comes in and just dumps 50%. We understand they’re down at the moment. If they’re down, how long is it going to take to the ships to suddenly start to come in? Am I going to be the “mugu” who order the last ship before he comes up? What’s going to happen to my ship when I arrive? What’s going to happen to the cargo when I arrive? So you’re going to wait for a significant period where you say I want to be sure everywhere is dry before I bring in my ship. It’s not the way we want to be doing planning.

Is Dangote part of the association where these issues are discussed?

Whether he’s part of it doesn’t matter.  We’d like them to be, but if you’re doing 50%, why would you go and join anybody? In short term, it sounds like I don’t need to do it.

He’s already controlling half the market.

Long term, it’s actually in your interest because you want to know and participate with all the players there.  The way to play it is to make sure you don’t have these kinds of disruptions that then just sends shockwaves. How would you minimize and actually grow demand.

You “grow demand.”

Yes! If I double demand, which is what we’ve been proposing, predicting for so long, if I had double demand from 1.5 to 3 million, that 50% comes down to 25%. Everybody’s happy. You haven’t affected them in any way, they’re still selling their volumes, but the shock in the system is not the same.

How exactly do you grow demand?

Cylinders. LNG trucks. LPG. Keke Napep programmes that I’ve spoken about. That’s how you grow demand.

The 10Million cylinder programme,  it was supposed to grow demand. After that administration went out, I’m not sure it’s running again.

No, it’s not.

We need to stimulate demand. We need to convince the end user that it matters. There’s an Autogas facility that we commissioned in Kano. At the time you couldn’t get CNG buses up there and at the time the subsidy had been removed, but the forex part hadn’t been subsidized, so the fuel was competitive. This was an existing gas facility.

So, we went ahead and put in the Autogas, and converted for a number of people and they were coming back and we were taking the data. Then all of a sudden, the forex thing happens, prices are spiking, all of a sudden, you’re back in the subsidy. The gas regime price now remains stagnant, Keke Napep guy who has dual fuel says I’m not going to be coming to buy highly-priced gas, this is not a social experiment, it’s a commercial proposition. That facility is moribund.

You put in some effort to make that facility work?

We put in effort, we put in investment. Where’re am I going with this? This is just an isolated example, it is not as if other people didn’t try in their own localities, locations etc. This thing took maybe forty-five days to fifty, but it was already a gas depot.

So there was existing infrastructure?

Let’s say 60% commonality. We still had to bring in all the dispensers and build a way where people had to fill cylinders and for trucks and for minibuses and the likes. So there was some expenditure. Now what proportion of that expenditure was saved by being on the gas side as opposed to being on a fresh site like a gas station? I’d say probably next-to-nothing why? Because on a gas station, it’s already concreted, all I have to do is bring in my skid tank. Skid tank already has everything I need. The advantage is if I find out that market is not a market as such, I’ll move to another part.

What you pointed out was your organisation trying to promote use of gas by putting in facilities for that to work. And there was an uptake of it for a certain period of time, until forex prices spiked.

Those decisions arrived at a point where the people we converted for don’t come back. Now that subsidy has been removed, Dangote is online, there’s now a discrepancy, there’s now a good differential between gas and gasoline again. So there’s a case for Autogas to come back.

How do you solve the investment of this facility, you increase the population of new users who might then convince the old users to come back. Each one of those conversion kits cost money. We funded those conversion kits. Somebody needs to partially fund them. You must have skin in the game. If you’re buying a Keke Napep at three million Naira and a gas Keke Napep is 3.5 million    Naira, then the government should be able to say I’ll make it 3.1 million Naira, because I want you to be committed to using gas. The benefit is that when you start to buy gas, you’ll be buying gas cheaper. The government still achieves its objective and it sells more local gas. This person gets the benefits of having cheaper costs. Costs of living and so on, so there are multiple levels of the impact.

There’s a lot of work to be done, it’s granular and who’s able to do that granular work? It’s a handshake between government and private sector.

Nigeria exports around 40,000-50,000 tonnes per month of LPG produced in the country. What would it take to convince Chevron to keep those volumes in Nigeria? Is it an incentive issue? And how would that LPG, which is Propane, become Butane, which is really where there can be instant uptake?

The volume is 40,000 per month. There’re three exporters today, MobilESSO, NLNG and Chevron FPSO. NLNG has domesticated all its LPG. It has tried to domesticate its Propane but because of policies around no AutoGas market, it can’t bring it in. So the intent is there and the infrastructure is there to bring it in but policy needs to help them. I like to dissect so that I’m not doing a holistic solution. MobilESSO, we see their cargoes coming in every so often of the LPG, but Propane still gets exported. For whatever reasons, their own reasons, I don’t know. ChevronFPSO is a mixed product. Their argument has always been that it is not the spec. That’s not the case. The specifications were changed some years back, specifically to accommodate their product. So AutoGas LPG accommodates their product but there are still excuses. Whatever reasons they’ll get round to it.

Now their combined volumes  plus  Dangote are more than enough to satisfy the country. You don’t want to be in a situation where you are still exporting when clearly you also want to grow the local market to give them a place to push these products.   Again,it you get granular. That’s how you resolve each person’s problem to achieve a broader objective.

How is your company Asiko Energy navigating all the challenges we’ve been talking about?

It has been incredibly tough to navigate the number of shocks that have come in.  I was told this and I will use this to answer. “In Nigeria, standing still is progress” because there’re so many people flying past you going back the other way. You’re the one standing still, they’re hailing you and saying You Stand Well!

What are Asiko Energy’s main accomplishments in the last two decades?

We started with an idea and we’ve been  focussed on what we want to do, gas infrastructure and we’re building that gas infrastructure. The focus has not changed, the timeline is what stretched out. But that’s the story of this market.

Yes, there’s been achievement, I’m not one to sit and be patting anybody on the back, whether it’s me, whether it’s the team. I think the fact that we’re still at it tells you something. I’m proud of what we’ve done, but I will also say I’ll be the first person to I think we can do so much more.

If you want to point to one specific achievement, what would that be?

We’ve built our business from nothing through significant efforts on staff side. Significant commitment on shareholders side, where shareholders stay silent and non-rebellious for close to 20 years where there’re no returns. And the story about where I want to get to, where you want to get to, some markets will not take that easy. Resilience and support from shareholders, investors whether it’s shareholders or bankers. Although that side could have been easier. For me that’s more the issue.

We now have a company of 150 to 200 depending on what metric we’re using in terms of employees. We’ve done well. We’ve got a number of shareholders but we’re not a PLC. I’m quite proud of it, but to what potential of the company is  in such a market, with so much gas resource, I’m not ready to pop champagne. We’re not there yet.

You’re building Nigeria’s first tri-fuel  (Propane, LPG and LNG) gas terminal. Where do you source your core raw materials from?

We source from other sources, otherwise the risk is too high and mostly in Nigeria.

You’re one of the biggest, if not the biggest asides from Dangote. He has to use gas.

We’re not producing, he’s producing. There’re other producers that are bigger than us. We distribute so we have a significant play in the distribution area. We are a significant player in the distribution area. LPG I’d say top five, Propane maybe top three and LNG again top three. By the time we land, we’ll be capacity wise similar to what Greenville does until maybe they expand.

 You’re a big midstream player, one of things you’ll need to do is to secure your backward integration and supply chain.

The short answer is yes, the long form answer is this. In LPG we have probably close to anywhere from 50 to 100 suppliers. NLNG just happens to be biggest. In Propane we have probably up to 20 suppliers. NLNG doesn’t feature in that today. A few years back they were, but the pricing doesn’t work for us in propane, but we have a contract for propane from NLNG. On LNG they will be our only supplier because they’re the only producer in-country that will sell to us coastal-wise. We have contract with them for that. But the terminal being there, we can bring any other ship in to bring us LNG. We are not completely attached to NLNG, but they have been a significant supply partner and advocate for Asiko.

What are the lowest hanging opportunities in the “alternative–to PMS/Diesel Market” if you were to advise a nne-comer?

In PMS, I’d say it’s the displacement of Keke Napep. It’s the easiest thing to handle, however it must be done from a technically savvy point of view. You don’t want just anybody to handle it. That’s not going to work, it will create more damage. So, we want people to go in and be able to convert Keke Napep safely or buy them new safely. However even if you buy a new one, you have to be able to maintain and operate safely. So that’s the lowest hanging fruit but it has qualifications. On the diesel side, it’s wise to say while we don’t have a good grip on power. So, [we could use] the Auto generation for power as well as the Autogas for transportation.

What can the regulatory agencies and policy makers do better?

The PIA is not sacrosanct, sometimes when you talk to people, they think it is. It’s an Act. There’re many flaws in that Act, it needs to be amended, and if an Act last longer than five years you should get worried because things move on. So where’s the review body? Where’s the body that says let’s test what has happened? Turkeys will not vote for Christmas; it’s anybody that is empowered by the PIA that is going to initiate that process. It has to be the same process that enacted the PIA. So it is well overdue for a review. What did we hope to achieve? Have we achieved it? If not, what do we need to tweak? That’s for the governmental arms that enacted it. We’ve put in our recommendations on more than one occasion. What cannot be changed in the Act but can be amended by regulation.

How many years?

It’s been going longer than five years. It’s a really dynamic industry. You don’t want uncertainty by changing it every week. You also don’t want rigidity by waiting ten years.  It should be every five years. And you need a two year lead time to say what are the things that should change. That consultation hasn’t happened. That’s what I would say could be done better.

Those big black tanks for your project. When that project is completed, what  volume will be pushed out annually?

I’d say about 10% of the market for LPG and Propane. At that time, we predicted that it would be about 1.8Million tonnes tri-fuel. One hundred and eighty thousand tonnes for gas one and gas two – LPG and Propane. Gas three, the LNG can do three times as much, gas one and two. LNG can do close to 600,000 tonnes annually. We’re focusing on all of it. It’s just the phase that you’re bringing it on. If I’m building a  600-room hotel, some part of it is Eko Signature, some part of it is regular. Which one do I bring on first? It doesn’t mean I stop the construction of the other. I just earn revenue off one whilst I try to complete the others.

What keeps you up at night?

Sheer frustration. I get frustrated by the timeline of delivery. But it doesn’t keep me awake at night. What frustrates me and keeps awake at night is that we’re squandering our future. We have squandered our gas opportunity. It’s not too late, but there’re others that are stepping into the spots that we should have established ourselves  a long time ago. As a nation we have not done what we need to do. As a nation are we even close to achieving our potential? I’ll leave it for others to decide. But if I’m staying up awake at night, it means I have decided.

Is there anything  that we have not asked you that   you would want our readers to know about Asiko Energy?

I need more money!

Are you willing to sell part of your equity?

We have done. People often assume that Asiko Energy is Felix, it’s not! We have close to thirty-something shareholders soon to go to forty-something. So it’s not a Dangote that you’re looking at. It’s not the motivation here, it’s much more about this thing can be done so let’s do it.

So in the thirty plus years that you have been in the industry, you still haven’t gotten someone else that you can pitch this idea to who can partner in your vision?

I started in the industry roughly about 1989, so when this year is over, it will be thirty-six years. Roughly half of it is offshore, half of it is here. This marks my twentieth year in Nigeria. Felix Ekundayo of 20 years ago if you ask will be extremely disappointed at what Felix Ekundayo of 2025 has achieved. That’s the frustration part of it, because Felix Ekundayo of twenty years ago understood having come from places where he worked Qatar, Saudi Arabia, India, people who were just beginning to say what is gas and going full on into gas. Look at where they are today.

I described to one of our people today that we’re like a young playboy who is at the traffic light in his brand new Ferrari and for 20 years has not moved from the spot. You know people like saying    “my car will dust you.” In the meantime the man that is on a keke, even the man walking is moving and beating you. That’s an extremely frustrating existence. So that is the challenge. Are there opportunities? Yes, there are. Are we taking advantage of those opportunities? Yes, we are. Can we do more? Yes, we can.

Looking at  the model of the plant, give an overview of the work so far.

We broke ground December 2021. We should have finished this project by 2023, here we are in 2025. We will finish  this year. We have part-funded these tanks which we can use to start, this is the LNG tank. We’ve drilled the pipe two kilometres to Apapa. What you don’t see is what’s in the ground. Two kilometres in the ground for the LPG and Propane.

We had to drill again for the LNG line because it’s a special consideration. No company in the world has done what we are going to do, for the distance we’re going to go. Two kilometres of LNG pipeline subterranean. We drilled under Apapa. We engaged two drilling rigs one at the jetty and one at our compound, essentially run through three compound curves to get our LPG line in. It’s a very complex drill but we’ve completed it. The line is in place, we can start, we can run this facility.

We have from that gained the azimuth, the track for the LNG line so that’s not the technical challenge. It was technically challenging on the LPG project. The LNG project is a metallurgy issue because with the pipe, normal temperature is 40 degrees, the pipe is going to run at  minus 160 degrees, a 200 degree drop. You can’t use the standard steel. Not even NLNG steel would work here.

So where’re you getting your steel from?

Well, that’s a different story. That’s the technical challenge we’ve had to resolve.

The Nigerian government has whittled down an ambitious plan to boost cooking gas demand as an alternative to dirty, highly polluting fuels.

The project to distribute Ten Million (10Milion) LPG cylinders, launched in 2021 by the government of former President Muhammadu Buhari,  has been stepped down in favour of a “Moving 1Million homes to clean cooking by 2030”, announced by the Tinubu government in May 2024.

President Tinubu has been widely praised for bolstering investment in upstream oil and gas activity, with clearer line of sight to increased crude oil and natural gas production. With price control gone and a fuller deregulation activated, there has also been an uptick in the downstream market in he view of petroleum marketers.

But these reforms have meant little in terms of abolishing energy poverty for the vast majority of Nigerians and the lack of access to clean cooking gas is an indicative point of reference.

Rising cost of LPG has crimped consumption, which was in decline in 2023 (1.3Million tonnes per year) compared with 2022 and the demand trend was flat from 2023 to 2024. This has bucked a decade plus trend in the demand trajectory.

“What we had been seeing was a 20% jump year-on-year for the last fifteen if not seventeen years: a 20% increase aggregate”, says Felix Ekundayo, chairman of the Nigeria Liquefied and Compressed Gases Association (NLCGA). “That kind of came to a halt in 2022 [with]   a slight decline due to  policy missteps that happened. Some of it had to do with VAT and other missteps – the ability of customers to bring in product which then leads to a price incline. So,  2023 was a decline. 2024 was not a recovery,   it was flattening out”.

The current government has introduced incentives to fix the missteps that Ekundayo speaks about, “but the ability of the consumer to pay has also been affected; the situation at the moment is we’re not entirely sure what would pan out”. The full interview was published in the May 2025 edition of Africa Oil+Gas Repport.

The major hurdle to accessing LPG has been the cost of a cooking gas cylinder, especially for the rural poor who use firewood for cooking.

The Buhari government had announced in April 2021 that it was working towards injecting five to 10 million cooking gas cylinders into the market within the next one year; starting the cylinder injection under the first phase in 11 pilot states including Lagos, Ogun, Bauchi, Gombe, Katsina, Sokoto, Delta, Bayelsa, Ebonyi, Enugu, Niger and the Federal Capital Territory, a spread that indicated two states from each of the geopolitical zones. The cylinders were to be injected through the marketers who would then be responsible for the cylinders. The exchange was to take place in homes and not in filling stations.

In effect, there is a 90% scaling back of the 10Million LPG Cylinder injection programme, expected to have been delivered by 2022, but which was hardly implemented.

What the Tinubu administration has been doing is to take a stab at it, as it were.  ⁠ Ekperikpe Ekpo, Nigeria’s Minister of State for Petroleum (Gas) who was appointed in August 2023, launched a programme in May 2024, which features six LPG penetration initiatives, one for each geopolitical zone. Mr. Ekpo has been very careful not to claim that his office aims to distribute even One Million cylinders. What he can be quoted as saying is “1Million homes to clean cooking by 2030”. And the cylinders they distribute are donations from private-sector firms like A4E and SmartGas and BUA.

Mr. Ekpo was in Maiduguri in March 2025 and  Sokoto in June 2025 (both in Northern Nigeria) for  what was themed Decade of Gas outreach—”Moving 1Million homes to clean cooking by 2030″ programme.