Climate change: Oando to roll out 12,000 electric buses in Nigeria

Oando Clean Energy has announced its readiness to roll out 12,000 electric buses in Nigeria in line with the climate solution agenda to limit carbon greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

The Executive Vice President of Oando Clean Energy, Ademola Ogunbanjo, announced this at the ongoing climate change conference known as COP28 in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Wednesday, December 6, 2023.

Ogunbanjo said the company would begin assembly of electric buses in Nigeria by 2026, saying viability test and Environment Impact Assessment for the project were already concluded.

He said two buses had already been deployed in Lagos which he said would be up-scaled to 50 soon out of the 2,000 planned for the state.

He stated: “The agenda is 2,000 buses for Lagos, 12,000 for Nigeria; nobody must import 12,000 buses into the country when we have the capacity to build a local assembly.

“We will be assembling vehicles in Nigeria forever; making it electric does not change anything.

“Whatever it needs, we only need to work together, private sector and the government, to ensure we pull resources together and build local capacity.

“It is the only way we can grow. The error we made in the oil and gas era when we did not build as much local capacity as we could or should have. We won’t repeat that with energy transition.

“Energy consumption and transportation form the two largest contributors to greenhouse gases emissions in our country. Transportation is more so because we are largely a logistic-based economy. We don’t manufacture much; we import a lot and we move whatever we imported around.

“With wind energy project and sustainable transport system, we can decarbonise our economy; if we can decarbonise the transportation sector in Nigeria, we would have made a giant stride towards the achievement of our Net Zero agenda by 2060.”

Earlier in his address, the President of Oando Clean Energy, Dr Aionojie Irune, said the company was moved by the show of seriousness that Nigeria exhibited in the energy transition conversation.

Irune added that Oando Clean Energy was committed to the 2060 Net Zero target.

The Star