From Uche Usim Abuja
Group General Manager, National Petroleum Investment Management Services (NAPIMS), Mr Bala Wunti, has disclosed that the Joint Venture partnership between the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and TotalEnergies has raked in €1 million (euros) from the carbon credit market.
A carbon credit is a permit that allows a company that holds it to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. One credit permits the emission of a mass equal to one ton of carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, the company may sell any unneeded credits to another company that needs them.
Speaking on the sidelines of the ongoing 2021 edition of the Nigeria International Petroleum Summit NIPS in Abuja, Wunti said the carbon credit market business model, which allows companies the opportunity to have a reduced emission, has fetched Nigeria some positive credit.
“You accumulate this credit and use it in several ways. There are two major ways. It’s either you use your carbon credit position to offset your negative position in some other businesses and create a carbon neutrality, or if you have an excess carbon credit that you don’t have a need to use it to offset your negative, you can monetize it for someone who is in a negative position and when you’re monetising, you change it to money. That essentially is what Total, our partners did on our behalf in the JV. We have this positive carbon credit position which we don’t have an immediate need for to offset our negative and we monetised it.
“We have so far realised more than €1million from that. That is an additional revenue inflow that we see and it will become more pronounced as we go into the energy transition world.
“We are pushing that this is adopted across the country. If we can do it with Total, we can do it with others.
In a very near future, the whole world will see the potential that Nigeria has and the value we can create. The NNPC GMD has said that we should do all we can with our partners to monetise that credit position on behalf of Nigerian people”, the NAPIMS boss explained.
