Domestic Natural Gas Supply in Nigeria: A Critical Review of Policy, Infrastructure, and System-Level Constraints

Abstract

Nigeria is home to one of the world’s largest natural gas reserve base, however despite this natural abundance, the country struggles to deliver reliable gas supply for local consumption to power generation plants and feedstock to domestic gas based industries, this failure persists even after repeated attempts by the Government through domestic gas policy formation and reforms, regulatory interventions and infrastructure drives aimed at positioning natural gas as Nigeria’s energy security foundation. This review takes a close look at some existing literature on the topic of Nigeria’s domestic gas supply and attempts to explain the structural drivers of this system failure. Studies published in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings and authoritative institutional sources were analysed to evaluate how policy design, regulatory framework, enforcement, development of infrastructure and market dynamics all work together to shape domestic gas supply outcomes. The approach applied is integrative, where regulatory, value-chain and infrastructure dimensions are considered in the postulation of the domestic gas sufficiency issue. This review is aimed at the identification of key gaps in existing literature on the topic of domestic gas sufficiency in Nigeria including the approach of fragmented analysis of the value chain, weak enforcement of Nigerian domestic gas supply obligation, insufficient infrastructure assessments, ignored demand side risk and scarce empirical evaluations of the cluster based gas development methods or approach. This paper makes an effort to consolidate dispersed evidence and showcase the constraints, thereby presents a clear analytical foundation for future research in this area and subsequent policy design, it emphasizes the need for a system-level execution oriented framework that considers infrastructure spread, regulatory mechanisms and financially credible demand, especially within the power sector, all with the aim of achieving sustainable domestic gas supply in Nigeria.