Uche Cecil Izuora
The Governor of Bauchi state, Bala Mohammed, has informed that Governors in the North East would jointly take action that would guarantee sustainable energy sector development for the region.
Mohammed, said the North-East Governors were collaborating to capitalise on the deregulated electricity sector and tackle the power challenges in the region.
In a rare television address, the Governor said, “Fortunately, we have the North East Development Commission (NEDC) and we decided as six Governors that we are going to do something uniformly. The huge capital required to provide power is not for states like us that don’t have the benefit of derivation or extra resources. We have to start somewhere.
“The inside knowledge will give us a better understanding of where we are and where we want to go. We have a comparative advantage in terms of green energy. In Bauchi and Gombe, we have hydrocarbons and gas, and the presence is so huge.
“In my own state, we are working with the private sector, and we are going to establish a N1.5 billion cement factory to produce 10 metric tonnes of cement annually,” he added.
During the broadcast he observed that the Kolmani Integrated Development Project in the North-east, a multi-billion naira oil exploration project located between Gombe and Bauchi communities, is not being funded and work has slowed down significantly.
Mohammed said that not much activity was going on around the area, stressing however that the government was no longer serious about the project.
“After the expiration of the last regime, since then we have not seen much activity. But recently, we saw some bulldozers, as if to deceive and delude us. As far as we are concerned, we are leveraging other resources I told you about. We have coal.
“There is not much activity going on in Kolmani River located between Gombe and Bauchi states, maybe due to the huge capital involved. But I spoke to some NNPC officials, and they said they are coming back.
“But for a long time, they have disappeared, and it will appear they are not very serious about it. I am trying to get an appointment with the president to appeal to him on our behalf because it will be an astute development for oil and gas potential.
“That means we are going to have power generation, a refinery, and a petrochemical industry. We will have so much, and since we don’t have pipes to take oil to Europe, it will be a double-edged advantage for us if we get developers with the capacity. It will also serve the whole northern part of the country,” Bala Mohammed said.
In November 2022, former President Muhammadu Buhari, flagged off the project, stressing that the oil exploration in the area had already attracted over $3 billion foreign direct investment and will boost Nigeria’s earnings, with discovery of over 1 billion barrels of oil reserves and 500 billion Cubic Feet of gas.
Buhari then said the project was expected to start with a daily production of about 50,000 barrels of crude oil and was meant to be funded by the Frontier Exploration Fund (FEF) with the allocation of 30 per cent of the profit from NNPC’s upstream oil and gas contracts.