Asiko Energy Holdings Limited has completed a 5,000-metric-tonne liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) terminal in Ijora, Lagos, with the company saying the facility will enable it to source cheaper cooking gas and pass the savings on to Nigerian consumers. The completion ceremony took place on Tuesday, 30 September, nearly two decades after the project was first conceived.
The company’s Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Felix Ekundayo, said the terminal was built specifically to give Asiko Energy access to a broader range of LPG producers — including suppliers whose products do not initially meet Nigerian specifications but can be blended to standard. “There are other producers out there that make LPG that is cheaper. It’s not the right specification, but it can be blended to make the right specification, which will help us drop down the price of cooking gas,” Ekundayo said.
That blending capability is central to the commercial case. It gives the company flexibility to shop around on price rather than remain tied to a narrow pool of compliant suppliers — a constraint that has helped keep costs stubbornly high for households and businesses alike.
What was built and who paid for it
The terminal connects to three of Nigeria’s largest LPG delivery jetties via roughly two kilometres of underground pipeline running towards Apapa. Construction consumed approximately 4,000 truckloads of sand, more than 6,000 tonnes of steel and 1,500 stone columns sunk to a depth of 13.5 metres. The scale of the build reflects how long the project sat on the drawing board.
Financing came from the Midstream and Downstream Gas Infrastructure Fund, the Bank of Industry, Stanbic IBTC, Wema Bank and InfraCredit. Asiko Energy Chairman Alex Ogedegbe argued that the project demonstrated government-backed intervention funds could unlock private capital for major gas infrastructure — a point worth noting at a time when Nigeria’s infrastructure financing gap remains enormous. The company has also announced plans to expand the terminal in a second phase to include LNG storage and distribution.
A supply gap that cannot be ignored
Nigeria LNG Limited Managing Director Adeleye Falade used the ceremony to spell out how far behind infrastructure has fallen. NLNG has directed all its LPG output to the domestic market since 2022, with annual production now reaching roughly 500,000 tonnes. That sounds substantial. It is not enough. “As of last year, we were already producing in-country 500,000 tonnes of LPG, but guess what? It’s now just about 40 per cent of the country’s demand,” Falade said.
That yawning gap has fed directly into the prices Nigerians pay at the pump. LPG is currently selling at between N1,400 and N1,500 per kilogramme, and the National Bureau of Statistics has reported that the average retail price for refilling a 5kg cylinder rose by 13.73% month-on-month, while refilling a 12.5kg cylinder climbed by 13.89% over the same period. Lagos recorded the highest average price for a 5kg refill at N9,745.10.
Whether the Ijora terminal alone can move the needle on those figures remains to be seen. What is clear is that Nigeria’s cooking gas problem is a supply problem first and a pricing problem second — and building more infrastructure of this kind is the only credible path to relief.