Many Nigerians have taken the push for compressed natural gas (CNG) adoption in vehicles with a pinch of salt. Concerns range from the cost to safety. Using personal experience and professional expertise, Tunde Onakoya, an auto mechanic and CEO of AutoClinic, addresses these issues and more about CNG in this interview with PAUL OMOROGBE.
The first question that comes to people’s mind about CNG especially after that explosion in Benin City is about the safety. What can you say to that?
Is it really safe? Yes, CNG is very safe. I daresay unequivocally that CNG is safer than petrol, than diesel, than cooking gas. Well, it’s safer because, let’s look at it from the scientific standpoint to start with. Petrol is highly flammable. It wouldn’t matter the concentration of petrol you have in a space, it will burn.
Diesel, the same thing. Diesel burns and even burns hotter than petrol. What we call their flashpoints are relatively very low, the point at which they catch fire. So, they are very highly flammable. Cooking gas, the same thing because the three are all extracts from crude oil.
So that’s why we have LPG as liquefied petroleum gas. We have AGO, that’s diesel, and we have PMS, premium motor spirit, that is also known as gasoline, that’s petrol – highly flammable – because they also have the capacity to pool. If petrol is dropping somewhere like this, it keeps pooling in that place and it can dry up, it can cause fire.
However, CNG is natural gas, it’s pure methane. And methane is naturally occurring, oftentimes when you have decomposition of organic matter.
So that is why people can do things like biogas, converting human and animal waste to gas. That same gas is the methane that is now compressed into what we know now as compressed natural gas.
Now, because of its low flammability rate, it is a relatively stable gas. Now when CNG, which of course starts from being LNG, liquefied natural gas, becomes compressed, it gets compressed to about one percent of its size and put in a cylinder for use. Now the burning point of CNG flammability is usually between five and 15 percent concentration within a certain area. Being compressed natural gas, it is lighter than air. So, the moment it comes out of its container, it disperses so quickly. So, it is safer to use.
Let’s now look at it also from storage for use in vehicles. An average petrol tank would be between 1- and 1.5-mm thickness in terms of the metal sheets for those tanks made of metal. If it is plastic as well, it can be punctured or ruptured easily. The same thing with diesel.
CNG cylinders, as it were, are average of 5 to 10 millimeters (mm) in thickness. The minimum thickness I have seen is about maybe 5.7, 5.8 mm and that is for the ones that are made from iron, the ones that are metal cylinders. That’s type one.
We have type two that has some element of plastic and metal fused together to make it. We have type three which has some carbon fibre in it which is very resilient material.
We also have type four which is plastic, a certain type of plastic is used for it as well with carbon fiber and all of that. So, they are well-built and they are not something that at the moment Nigeria has the capacity to manufacture. We will need to build the capacity to manufacture them. So, in terms of safety, flammability aspect is what I talked about.
Then for other forms of safety now: in the petrol system, some vehicles will have a collision detection system on it, in such a way that when the car is in a collision, there’s a fuel shutter valve that stops the flow of petrol.
However, that is not common in all vehicles. It’s only in a few. Even for the car to start afterwards you need to push a reset button for it to start working again.
But in the case of CNG, there are multiple layers of safety around it. One is the tank itself. It’s almost bulletproof in terms of its thickness.
Number two, on the tank itself there is a safety valve on it that if the temperature is above a certain level, it disperses the gas inside as quickly as possible to prevent explosion. If the pressure inside the system is above a certain limit, it will also disperse the gas as quickly as possible. That’s about the safety valve.
The solenoid that opens on the reducer for the compressed natural gas (CNG) system is controlled by a computer. Now, that computer picks signals from collision as well. If there’s a collision on that vehicle, that computer, the ACU, will shut down that valve on the reducer to prevent CNG escaping.
These are some of the safety features that are on the CNG system. Again, I dare say it is safer than petrol.
Why then did we have that explosion in Benin City?
Well, I am not sure that any official report has been put out as to why. What we are told is that there’s an investigation that is ongoing. We have a group of people that are CNG practitioners in Nigeria. When the accident happened, we looked at the videos, the pictures. We even have some of our colleagues that are in Benin City that went to witness or take a look at the scene afterwards and what was there. And it was observed that the cylinder, the supposed cylinder, because we can’t call it a cylinder – there’s a way a CNG cylinder is manufactured. There are no welding points on a CNG cylinder. It is almost as if a tube is blown into that shape.
So, there are no welding points on it. But this cylinder in Benin, from all the pictures and videos that were seen, shows that somebody went to fabricate it. It definitely is a substandard, illegal cylinder that is not meant for CNG systems.
Now, no professional worth his weight would ever participate in that, because one of the rules of the CNG field is that every cylinder, every tank, must have a certificate. And that certificate is often what is called the water test certificate, wherein water is injected into that cylinder under extremely high pressure, higher than it would ever have to take, of CNG. They do that to confirm there is no leakage. In fact, CNG cylinders are expected to be subject to this test every three years after installation. This is so that we are sure that the integrity of the cylinder remains the same.
So that cylinder in Benin could not have been considered to be a proper CNG cylinder.
Let us also not forget that CNG has been in use in Benin City, where this incident happened, as far back as 2009. That’s 15 years!
If the Benin City mishap is the first in 15 years, you cannot say that the safety record of CNG is in question when we continuously have petrol tanker and petrol vehicle explosions all over the country. We have that frequency of petrol explosions and we still use petrol, and we still use diesel. In fact, we know of several LPG stations or several LPG cylinders that have exploded and caught fire across the nation. In fairness and in practice, you can’t use that to demonise CNG. It would be extremely unfair to do so.
Let’s talk about the cost of conversion.
For anybody to do CNG conversion in Nigeria today, the least you’ll pay is over a million Naira. Even those that the Federal Government is converting for free, somebody’s paying the bill and that’s the Federal Government of Nigeria. So, the fact that they are not paying out of pocket doesn’t mean that it’s free. Somebody else is paying and that’s taxpayers paying for it.
For ride-hailing drivers, they pay 50% of the cost. And they can then tell you that, oh, we pay N675,000. If N675,000 is 50% of the cost, that has put the cost at about N1.3 million. So it means that even the government is aware of how expensive this can be.
Before recent times, CNG conversions went for as low as N300 to N350,000. But the factors and economic indicators are playing their major part in this.
For CNG installation to be done, you need a conversion kit and you need a CNG cylinder. Now, an average CNG cylinder of about 65-liter capacity weighs about 70 kg, type one. If you look at the cost of freighting 70 kg of cylinder into Nigeria, that is not manufactured in Nigeria, in US dollars, and the cost of clearing it, and the cost of the taxes you put on it, even local transportation, you know that is going to be expensive.
The same thing applies to the kits. At the time we’re talking about, dollar was barely N198.
Dollar is almost 10 times that now. If it was N300,000 then, by now it should be averaging N3 million, right? But it’s still under N1.5 million, which now means that because there’s more importation and government has given out waivers, duty waivers on CNG vehicles and CNG conversion kits, and government has given out tax reliefs for it as well, perhaps that is why it is still under N2 million.
But it depends on the vehicle. The one that’s the baseline everybody uses is four-cylinder vehicles, that is regular small vehicles with 65-litre tank. Some vehicles are V6, some are V8, some even use 75-litre tanks; some use 90-litre tanks, some use two units of 75-litre tanks, depending on what you want to use.
So, your cost can be as low as, say, N1.2 million or N1.3 million. It can go all the way to about N4 million, depending on the vehicle you’re converting, the capacity of the tank you are doing, and the type of tank you intend to use.
Now, let’s consider the cost involved in the use of CNG.
That’s interesting because it’s subjective as well. And if we’re looking at it, when you’re talking about gas mileage of a vehicle, in terms of fuel economy of a vehicle, it is usually based on many things. One, will be the engine inside the vehicle, engine capacity. Another thing would be the condition of the engine – talk about the spark ignition system, the air filter system. Then, the weight inside the vehicle. Is it a single passenger that’s inside the vehicle, or do we have a fully loaded vehicle? Gross weight or net weight, we have to look at it.
Tyre pressure is important as well. If your tyre pressure is very low, your fuel consumption, even on petrol, will be higher than it should be normally.
So, if we take all of these things into consideration, and we now compare both petrol and CNG under the same condition, from my personal experience, I’m somebody who has used CNG vehicle for years now, and feedback from our customers, we are getting an average, to be conservative, of 80% savings on the costs of fueling.
So basically, we are saying that if you are to take a trip for the next 100 kilometres on the highway, and you would require CNG, from our experience, CNG required for such a trip without traffic buildup, just straight on driving, was about equivalent of N1,100, which at N230 per SCM, puts it at about 5 SCM or 6 SCM.
Now for a petrol vehicle to do the same, you would need a minimum of 10 to 15 litres, to be conservative about it as well, depending on the vehicle you are driving. So, let’s say same vehicle, 10 to 15 litres. Ten litres of petrol today cost about N12,000 in Ibadan. So, its N12,000, that would be the average I have seen and gotten empirical data for.
And we’ve had people in the commercial transport space make us understand that they would take a trip, one leg of the trip for N3,000 with CNG, and the return leg with N35,000 with petrol.
We’ve also had feedback from people that were spending as much as N150,000, N180,000 a week on fueling their commercial haulage bus, tell us that it has dropped to below 30,000 a week on CNG. So, in terms of costs, it’s a no-brainer!
In fact, today I am speaking to you, I have taken a trip that has gone about 250 kilometres today, and I have spent less than 4,000 Naira on CNG.
That’s really interesting. So, let’s look at performance. The notion was that CNG is meant for heavy duty vehicles. What’s your take on that and engine performance?
That is correct. And I’m saying that it is a possibility that you will lose performance if you are running on CNG versus petrol if the installation was not properly done, particularly by a professional who has deep knowledge of vehicles and not just CNG conversions.
Now, somebody can be good with the installation of CNG, aesthetically so and safety wise, but may not be good with the proper calibration and mapping of the CNG system to deliver the same, if not better performance than petrol. So yes, it can lose performance if not properly handled.
My experience this afternoon was one of the times I was able to reconcile again one of the reasons I chose to go CNG. So, I was on the highway returning to Ibadan and ran out of CNG. And of course, my car automatically switched to petrol. And then I noticed after that a certain sound coming from my engine, because I was running on petrol.
It’s what we call a pinging noise in the engine. When the engine begins to ping because of either fuel starvation or the octane rating of the fuel is very low, meaning the fuel does not have enough calorific value to deliver the power you are demanding. And you know, when I heard that noise this afternoon, I was like, oh my God, this petrol again.
The moment I bought CNG into my vehicle, all of that noise disappeared. I can recall that the last time I ever heard that noise was perhaps April this year, because I think that perhaps it was the last time that I used petrol in a very long time. And then now again, in November, I’m driving the same engine to experience petrol.
And lot of people do not know that most of the issues with their engines are fuel-created problems. That’s another major advantage of CNG. CNG has an octane rating of between 130 and 150.
Petrol has a maximum octane rating of about 97, and that is pure petrol. Some of the petrol that comes to Nigeria, I doubt if they have up to 85. Because some are leaded and some are substandard petrol, which has high parts per million sulfur content, which is bad for the environment.
So yes, it is possible that the engine’s performance will reduce if it is not properly installed. And that is something that will not happen when you come to AutoClinic. While we are installing, during our calibration process, we switch the vehicle to petrol and check all the parameters for petrol. We switch to CNG and be sure that it is a match for that of petrol, if not better!
And that makes sure that you do not lose that power that you want using CNG.
Let’s also not forget one thing, and I’d like to mention that quickly. For those that see CNG as gas and petrol as petrol, and see diesel as diesel, that is not true.
Petrol is not liquid, diesel is not liquid, as far as your car engine is concerned, a car engine can only burn gas.
So, for your petrol to be usable inside the engine; for an injector engine, that is why you have the injector. Your fuel injector atomises the petrol, converts it to vapour for combustion. Diesel does exactly the same thing.
For a carbureted engine, it is not liquid petrol that goes into the engine. No. You have jets inside the carburetor that will atomise, turn petrol into fine particles as spray, vaporised inside the engine for it to burn.
Now, the advantage of CNG and LPG is that they are already in gaseous form. So, there is nothing that needs to be converted. So, that’s one of the reasons they are more efficient in terms of combustion.
That is why they produce less pollutants. That is why they burn better. And the only thing you notice from the tailpipe of the car is some carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide and water.
So, in terms of environment, is CNG safer? Oh, of course. It is cleaner and safer for the environment. You will notice trailers and trucks that run on CNG don’t give off black smoke! Look at them on the highway. Oftentimes when you notice a trailer, there is smoke everywhere. Go and check the CNG powered trucks and trailers you can’t see smoke.
Another challenge with CNG usage is in terms availability of filling stations for CNG. I want you to speak to that.
Yes, it is a disadvantage from the end user’s point of view. And I agree with it. We need more CNG stations. Up until May of this year, Lagos State had only one CNG refueling station, which was in Ikorodu. Nothing on the mainland, nothing on the island. But as of May of this year, it now has become eight stations.
Ogun State has one. Unfortunately, that one is in Ibafo, which is technically Lagos, if you look at it in terms of proximity. Oyo State has only one, which is in Ibadan.
One of the biggest challenges of CNG stations is the cost to put one up. And we have about three different ways you can get CNG. You can have a mother station, you can have a daughter station, and you can have Mobile Refueling Units, MRUs.
Mother stations are typically stations that are situated on the gas pipeline. They can just tap into that pipeline and begin to compress and sell to people. That gas pipeline is not everywhere!
So, then we have to use something called a virtual pipeline, which is a station where caskets or skids are loaded with that long tube. They will be filled with compressed natural gas and transported to a daughter station, where that casket or the skid is connected to their compressor. That compressor is then sent into the dispensing pump to dispense to people.
Why do they need a compressor there? Because when you fill up the skid at the mother station, you probably fill at about 250 bars. It has now become a virtual pipeline moving from the mother station to the daughter station.
By the time you get to the daughter station, the pressure will have dropped sometimes to as low as 180 bars. So, they need to have a compressor at the daughter station to be compressed to 250 bars so that trailers can take at that pressure and vehicles can take at 200 to 220 bars.
The third one is a mobile refilling unit that is more like a daughter station, but on wheels, where you can drive it somewhere, just situate it there and begin to dispense to people.
The typical problem with that kind of station is also low pressure over time.
So, we do not have enough, but the infrastructure required, some of it is being built.
Is it possible for the private sector to do this?
Absolutely. I know that the Nigeria Midstream Petroleum Regulatory Agency, is saying now that marketers won’t get a licence to open a new station without putting into consideration CNG infrastructure. As they’re selling petrol, diesel, kerosene, they should be able to sell LPG, CNG. That is part of the regulations they are putting in place. But we still have a long road ahead of us.
From what you’ve said so far, it seems like CNG might be more fit for Nigeria than going electric, if we don’t just want to join the bandwagon of going electric like the West.?
I’m lucky enough to have an opportunity to study electronic mobility and economics. So I can say as much about electric vehicles. Are electric vehicles the future? Yes, they can be. I’m not saying they are. I’m saying they can be. Anywhere in the world. And what can make them be is a lot of work that needs to be done that has not been done yet.
One is that the world, as it were, does not have the capacity to produce electric vehicles at the pace the world desires to replace fossil fuel vehicles. We cannot produce enough of it to replace the entire fleet we have right now. To replace the entire fleet of vehicles we have right now in the world with fuel-electric vehicles, we might need as much as 70 years, unless some sort of research comes up that makes it easier.
Secondly, people are not talking enough about the amount of the environmental impact of manufacturing electric vehicles, which includes mining of lithium. Almost every heavy-duty vehicle that is required to mine lithium is powered by diesel. So, the world still needs fossil fuel to even mine the raw materials for making batteries with lithium to power electric vehicles.
Of course, research is ongoing to get more materials that can be used other than lithium. Thirdly, the amount of energy required to be able to manufacture one electric vehicle is known to be more than 12 times what is required to manufacture regular internal combustion engine vehicles. So, there’s a lot of work that still needs to be done, and that’s why the cost of electric vehicles is pretty high.
Finally, we heard that some countries are phasing out CNG. Is Nigeria adopting old technology, something that countries are already running away from?
You know, we said that Nigeria is more of a gas country. They say they produce about seven billion cubic feet of gas per day in Malaysia. And they have about 25 natural gas producing fields, with 22 of them located offshore. Their reserve is equivalent to about 17 billion barrels of crude oil.
If we want to compare that to Nigeria: number one is Russia with natural gas reserves. Second is Iran. And if you look at it, both Russia and Iran are heavy on CNG vehicles.
Number three is Qatar. Number four is United States.
Nigeria is number five in the world. As of 2021 January, we have over 206 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in Nigeria. If we are the fifth largest in the world, the country before is the US with 368 trillion.
Now, in Africa, Nigeria is the largest. We own 33 percent of all the natural gas reserves in Africa.
So, if anybody is not fighting for natural gas usage, Nigeria should be. In fact, Nigeria has more than China, than Algeria, than Iraq in natural gas. Malaysia also has, but can you compare their number to ours?
They are phasing it out, agreed, because they started using and installing natural gas vehicles in 1995 which is almost 30 years, right? The average lifespan of a CNG cylinder is between 15 and 25 years.
So, what they are trying to do is, phase out all those vehicles. I mean, anybody that has converted 20 years ago, the vehicle is already too old to use. In fact, if you were in other countries, the taxes you would be paying on the usage of that vehicle would have become so high that you would have abandoned the vehicle.
No vehicle that is already in that age range, 1995, is going to be energy efficient in any way, or environmentally friendly, or efficient in any way. It is okay for them to phase it out. They are trying to protect their economy.
Because if they go ahead today and decide to start replacing those kits and those cylinders, what is the impact it has on their economy? It’s going to be a lot. But Malaysia has used this successfully from 1995 till now. That should be the lesson we should be picking from it. We are just starting and we haven’t even used it for 20 years.
A country is saying, hey, it’s almost 30 years. It’s time to let it go. I’m not saying that they will not allow people to buy new ones. We don’t know what their policy is going to eventually be. But truth be told, it is what it is.
The US today is the largest producer, not to reserve, of natural gas. A lot of school buses in America run on CNG. A lot of delivery vehicles, UPS, FedEx and the rest, they run on CNG. And we have not heard them phasing it out.
Almost every vehicle manufacturer in the US is giving room for people to convert their cars to run on CNG if they want. In fact, Ford made some vehicles and even had some natural gas kits made to be installed by them onto their vehicles.
In fact, in Nigeria, some OEMs are already installing CNG in their vehicles from factory now.
Again, if we want to develop, we know that your salary increase rate does not match what your expenditure is in Nigeria, no matter how many times they have increased it.
One thing that can benefit all Nigerians, without exception, whether you own a vehicle or you don’t, is lower transportation costs.
So, if we do a mass adoption of CNG for commercial vehicles, we can see cost of transportation drop as high as 70%. If it drops by 70%, it keeps more money in the pockets of every single person in Nigeria. And that helps. Then we can now have more disposable income to spend on FMCGs and other things.
So, is it beneficial to the Nigerian economy? Even if this is going to be for the next 20 years or for the next 10 years, it is a low-hanging fruit that can help us and help stimulate the economy.
Consumer spending will shift from fueling their cars every day, from high transportation costs, to now stimulating the economy by buying more FMCGs, leisure, travel, and all of that, which will in turn generate more jobs in those sectors. And that’s beneficial to everybody.
Nigeria is not coming into it too late. We are coming at the time that we should be coming into it because it is no longer sustainable for us to continue to pay subsidy; we agreed on that.
The almighty Dangote refinery has shown up in Nigeria and has not been able to crash our petrol price below N900, meaning that we are still, even if we refine locally, we can’t get cheap petrol. But we can always get cheap CNG because nobody is benchmarking CNG at international price.
It is our own, it is here. It’s cost of cleaning it up and bottling it that it’s going to cost us. We are not subject to international oil price inflation.
We are not subject to the war in the Middle East shooting up the price of crude oil. In fact, my first encounter with CNG in 2009 was when CNG was sold at 139 per SCM. Today it’s 230. That’s 109 naira difference in 15 years. Nothing in Nigeria has increased at that rate. Everything has gone through the roof. CNG has remained because there’s very little that needs to be done.
Now, as more mother stations are established with more pipeline expansion, the cost of CNG is likely going to come down. Like that AKK pipeline that’s currently going on in the North from Abuja, Kaduna, Kano, it will open up Northern Nigeria using the virtual pipelines.
Look at what that does. Lagos to Ibadan by car costs N7,500. Imagine that becomes N2,000. Imagine what that will do to the cost of goods and services. That’s what we should be aiming for.
