Levene Energies Tasks FG, Stakeholders on Fixing Credible Demand, Credit Risk to Unlock Nigeria’s Gas Boom

Peter Uzoho

Nigeria will not attract the billions of dollars needed to develop gas infrastructure and accelerate supply to domestic market unless government and industry stakeholders fixed credible demand and credit risk, especially in the power sector.

Group Managing Director of Levene Energies Limited, Nneka Arowolo, stated this while speaking on a panel at the 2026 NOG Energy Week in Abuja on realizing future gas economies.

Arowolo stressed that Nigeria’s problem was not gas supply but bankable demand and payment discipline.

She told the session that while gas aggregators should handle pooling demand, aggregating supply, managing credit risk and coordinating logistics, sequencing and prioritizing the tasks were critical.

She explained that industry conversations had already established that supply was not the issue, noting that Nigeria has abundant gas reserves and ranked among the top 10 globally.

She argued that supply has to be underpinned by credible demand, insisting that producers would not commit billions of dollars to build facilities to produce and process gas for domestic delivery obligations without assurance that there is a sustainable and reliable off-taker at the end of the pipeline.

The Levene Energies GMD maintained that credible demand was essential to ensure that gas would be taken and paid for, so that production would not be shut in due to the inability to evacuate it. She added that creditworthiness was equally critical and has to be prioritized.

Referencing the Decade of Gas target of 12 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/d) by 2030, with 8 bcf/d projected for the power market, she questioned whether the sector had resolved its liquidity problems and creditworthiness issues.

She equally asked if customers could take the gas and whether transmission and grid capacity constraints had been removed.

Arowolo stressed that the industry needed to fix creditworthiness and all the constraints that would enable gas to reach end users on the demand side, warning that logistics and supply would be irrelevant if those issues were not addressed.

She said the focus should be on everything but sequenced, with demand and its associated constraints tackled before supply and logistics.

She profiled Levene Energies as a fully integrated energy firm that started in the downstream before backward integrating into the upstream. She noted that Levene is part owner of Falcon Corporation and also holds a 30 percent stake in Axxela.

With Axxela operating over 400 kilometers of pipeline as Nigeria’s biggest private gas distributor across Lagos, Ogun, Port Harcourt and into Togo, she said the priority was having an off-take market and developing demand at the end of the pipeline.

Arowolo explained that the company needed commercial and industrial customers who could take the gas and pay for it reliably.

On regulation, she emphasized that the body language of the regulator has to be clear and that the regulator has to be an enabler. She said investors would commit capital if the rules of the game were clear and the regulator did what it promised.

She called for a regulatory framework that will help investors mitigate risk, with a sure path where commitments and investments will be protected and stability guaranteed.

Other panelists corroborated her position as Falcon Corporation’s General Manager, Commercial, Olufemi Rufai agreed that the gas aggregator –Gas Aggregation Company of Nigeria (GACN) had performed well but was not capitalized to cover credit risk, particularly for the power sector.

Rufai said the industry has to be deliberate about the issue, adding that relevant government agencies needed to step up and fund the shortfall rather than leave the risk to market participants.

He warned that without a decisive solution, growth plans would be constrained, noting that most current volumes were driven by export projects which served as anchor demand while domestic supply remained complementary.

He stated that projects locked into the domestic market struggled to be economic without resolving the power sector liquidity problem.

A member of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC)’s Gas Master Plan Implementation Assurance Tean, Ekpei Ukam, said Nigeria does not have a resource issue but needed disciplined execution, integrated infrastructure development, bankable markets and a collaborative approach across the value chain.