Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Mar 22, 2021 News
Kaieteur News-“Now, more than ever before, countries blessed with petroleum resources need to cooperate and collaborate to find the best means of benefitting from their God endowed resources. They need to come together to explore how best to elongate the life of petroleum by promoting the development of technologies that make petroleum more environmentally friendly.”
That sums up a recommendation made by Secretary General of the African Petroleum Producers Organisation (APPO), Dr. Omar Farouk Ibrahim during his feature presentation on the first day of the Guyana Basins Summit on Wednesday.
The African oil expert is adamant that, as the global energy transition progresses, egged on by global commitments to the Paris Climate pact, countries that intend to continue getting value from the petroleum industry must collaborate and cooperate with each other.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “the countries now championing the end of fossil fuel use, are the very ones with the capacity to develop the technology to mitigate the environmental hazards of oil and thereby elongate the life of petroleum. But as we all know, they are determined not to do this, even if we are ready to fund the project.”
Ibrahim, who is Nigeria’s former Governor for the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) said that the group had offered seed money for the development of carbon capture technologies more than a decade ago, but that this was not to the interest of institutions that had the capacity to do that.
He hopes that, moving forward, oil-reliant countries would team up to promote the technologies needed to prolong the life of the oil industry. In order to do this, he posits, countries will need to establish the energy infrastructure, refineries, petrochemical plants, pipelines, transport systems, etc.
“The West Africa gas pipeline running from Nigeria through Benin Republic to Togo and Ghana is a good example of regional collaboration in the provision of energy infrastructure,” Ibrahim said. “Plus we are on the way to extend that project to all West Africa, including the landlocked countries of Mali and Burkina Faso in the next few years.”
With similar endeavours, Ibrahim wants to make sure Africa weans itself off of a relationship of dependency on the developed global North, where those markets are sought after for crude, and foreign exchange is sought after, so they may purchase manufactured goods and services.
He said, “Some people have posited, in reference to the efforts by the developed countries of the world, to end fossil fuel use, that perhaps, this is a blessing to African oil producing countries. They posit that when African oil producers do not get markets for their crude oil, from which they get foreign exchange to buy manufactured goods and services from the developed economies, and thereby entrench the dependency syndrome, they will be forced to find some use for that crude oil in their own countries. And what better use than provide modern energy to the over 600 million people living in that continent without access to modern energy?”
To bring about the kind of change he said is needed, Ibrahim noted that developing countries have to come together.
“We in APPO came to this realization decades ago. And that is why our member countries are championing cooperation and collaboration, especially in the establishment of cross border and regional energy infrastructure.”
He said he is pleased to hear that Guyana’s President, Dr. Irfaan Ali has noted cooperation and collaboration with its neighbours as critical for the development of his country’s economy.
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Apr 19, 2024
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