Nigeria has signalled increasing shift towards the use of coal for the generation of electricity to power its economy as it invests N30 billion in the sector.
The West African country has coal reserves of about 25 billion tons and this, the government is eager to exploit.
Dr. Dauda Garuba, Technical Adviser at the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Abuja that the goal was to ‘complement the energy mix’.
This comes amid the enormous strain put on the nation’s weak electricity infrastructure by the huge growth of its population and businesses.
He added that the electricity problem was having adverse effect on the manufacturing sector and ‘so, the new thinking is to explore the energy mix option’.
Nigeria, he said, had a long history of coal extraction and mentioned the Enugu coal mines. ‘Oil was a later development that we latched on to and then neglected the coal sector.’
Source:Â Modern Ghana
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