'Low investment in downstream cause of scarcity'

• Published date: 08 January 2023
• Publication title: Nigeria - The Nation

Inadequate investment in the oil and gas sector is responsible for ceaseless petroleum products' scarcity, Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Pinnacle Oil and Gas Limited, Mr Peter Mbah, has said.

He spoke after a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

Mbah said the cause of the crisis was a result of a deficit of investment in the downstream sub-sector.

He said his firm, Pinnacle Oil and Gas, has started solving with the inauguration of the largest storage terminal in West Africa in Lagos last year.

Mbah said: 'There has been a deficit of the sort of investments Pinnacle has done in the last decades, but what we're doing right now is to address that stagnation of investments in the downstream oil and gas industry.

'As you know, this is an investment size of about $1 billion. So we are expecting to see more of such investments because what the Pinnacle has done is to create some efficiency in the supply and distribution value-chain of the downstream sector.

'So we are indeed expecting that more investment in the downstream sub-sector would completely eliminate the sort of scarcity you are witnessing today.'

Explaining why he had come along with the Chairman of Pinnacle Oil and Gas, who is the Emir of Bichi Kingdom in Kano State, Alhaji Nasiru Ado-Bayero, to the Villa to see the President, Mbah said it was a visit to express appreciation to Buhari for commissioning the company's huge facilities at Lekki, Lagos State, in October, last year.

He said the facilities' activities had lowered costs and improved the distribution of petroleum products to many areas in the country while also easing traffic in the Apapa area of Lagos...