Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua said on 13 June that the country’s energy infrastructure has become so decrepit he will soon have to call a ’state of emergency’. Nigerian environmental experts are urging the government to consider reintroducing coal mining to end the crisis, a move they say would also slow forest loss and desertification.

“Nigeria has an estimated 3 billion metric tonnes of coal reserves, the largest in Africa, which it should exploit for domestic use to stave off reliance on wood fuel which causes deforestation”, said Kabiru Yammama, a consultant on rural energy, citing a 1998 report of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) which warned that by 2020 “all the forests in Nigeria will disappear” if the current rate of deforestation is maintained.

Yammama, who heads a Nigerian non-governmental organisation called Green Shield of Nations, said forests in northern Nigeria have “almost all vanished”, and lumberjacks are now moving towards the rain forests in the south, felling and burning trees for firewood and charcoal.

“Coal provides one of the best alternative sources of energy for Nigeria due to its availability, easy usage and high heat emission”, Yammama said, explaining that domestically refined oil products are too expensive for most Nigerians, and that investment in this area would therefore do little to stop deforestation as most people would still burn cheaper wood and charcoal.

At the moment, Green Shield of Nations estimates deforestation at around 400,000 hectares per year, mostly in the north. The country’s 140 million inhabitants burn over 40 million tonnes of firewood annually, according to a 1999 survey by the NGO.

Desertification

According to Yammama, 35 percent of arable land in the north has been overrun by the desert, which is encroaching at a rate of between eight and 30 hectares annually, affecting the livelihoods of over 55 million people, more than the combined population of Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Mauritania.

These estimates have been confirmed by Nigeria’s National Meteorological Agency (NIMET) in a March 2008 report which said crop yield in the north dropped by 20 percent in 2007, in part due to an early end of the rainy season but also because of desertification.

Yammama said there is a direct link between the tree felling and the desert’s spread. In Nigeria’s northern neighbour, Niger, planting thousands of new trees has been found to stop or at least slow desertification.

Better alternative

The NGO’s proposal, to increase coal production, is the opposite of government policy. Coal production has been slashed from 77,000 tonnes per annum in 1990 to around 6,000 tonnes in 2004. And the investment priority at the moment is improving domestic oil refining, according to Abubakar Sambo, head of the Energy Commission of Nigeria (ECN), a state-run energy think-tank.

Among the factors responsible for the decline in coal mining are obsolete equipment causing an increase in production costs, Sambo said, and the revocation last year of all mining licenses, pending a privatisation process.

“Coal is a better alternative”, ECN’s Sambo said. But he warned that Nigeria will have to import costly clean-coal technology to avoid gas emissions which contribute to global warming.

The country will also have to set up enough coal mines, a capital intensive task that would require the participation of foreign investors, he said.

“Despite the inherent problems associated with coal mining I believe in three to five years Nigeria can start exploiting coal in enough quantities to meet domestic and industrial energy demand and save our forests from extinction”, Sambo said.