Nigeria accidentally discovered 206 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves while searching for crude oil.
Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva, disclosed this on Sunday at a News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) forum.
He said that the country could discover an additional 600 trillion cubic feet of gas to enable it to achieve the desired development required of a gas nation.
“We have a lot of gas in this country. We have 206 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves,” Sylva said.
“This number is already discovered in gas reserves and this 206 trillion cubic feet reserve was found while looking for oil, so it was accidentally discovered.
“We were actually going to look for crude oil and we found gas, and in that process of accidentally finding gas, we have found up to 206 tcf.
“So, the belief is that if we really aim to look for gas dedicatedly, we will find up to 600 trillion cubic meters of gas.”
The minister said the COVID -19 pandemic had some positive impact on the Nigerian oil and gas sector despite its negative effect on the global economy.
Sylva said the pandemic had forced Nigerians to take over the running of the oil and gas industry as most of the expatriates working in the sector had to travel to their countries because of the lockdown.
“They (referring to the expatriates) have to rush out so that they will be locked down in their countries, and when that happened, it means that we lost a lot of expatriate personnel,” he added.
“But the good side of COVID-19 for us is that our Nigerians were able to step into their shoes.”
