Thousands of residents and businesses across the Aba Ring-fence Area in Abia State were plunged into darkness on Friday following an abrupt disruption in natural gas supply to the 188-megawatt Geometric Power Plant, forcing a shutdown of electricity generation to the area.
The outage, which began around 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, affected the Aba Ring-fence Area, comprising Aba North, Aba South and seven other local government areas served by Aba Power, the electricity distribution arm of the Geometric Power Group.
Confirming the development in a statement on Friday, the Managing Director of Aba Power, Mr. Ugo Opiegbe, apologised to customers for the unexpected blackout, attributing the disruption to technical issues affecting the company’s gas supplier.
According to him, the gas pressure required to operate the power plant’s turbines dropped significantly within the last 24 hours, making it impossible to sustain electricity generation.
“Gas pressure has significantly dropped in the last 24 hours. The pressure, arising from our partner’s facilities, is not strong enough to power our turbines, each of which has a 47-megawatt capacity,” Opiegbe said.
Although the company did not identify the affected gas supplier, industry sources said Heirs Energies has supplied natural gas to the Geometric Power Plant over the past three years through its Associated Gas Gathering (AGG) facilities in the eastern region.
A senior official of the Nigeria Gas Marketing Limited (NGML), a subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak publicly, maintained that sufficient gas volume was available for the Geometric Power Plant.
The official, however, explained that the major challenge was the inability of Heirs Energies to swap its gas with NGML due to operational constraints affecting its Associated Gas Gathering facilities.
According to the official, the bottleneck lies in infrastructure limitations rather than inadequate gas availability, adding that efforts are ongoing among stakeholders to restore normal supply.
Energy consultant and mechanical engineer, Dike Ejike, said the disruption highlights the lingering infrastructure challenges confronting Nigeria’s gas-to-power value chain despite increasing indigenous participation in the oil and gas sector.
He noted that Heirs Energies, which took over the operation of Oil Mining Lease (OML) 17 in Owaza after the Federal government declined to renew the operating licence previously held by The Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), inherited aging infrastructure that had suffered years of inadequate investment.
Ejike explained that prolonged litigation over the OML 17 licence renewal between Shell and the Federal government discouraged major investments in critical gas infrastructure, leaving the new operator to contend with obsolete facilities requiring substantial rehabilitation.
He added that while Heirs Energies has made efforts to improve operations since assuming control of the asset, legacy infrastructure challenges continue to affect seamless gas delivery.
Opiegbe said it remained uncertain when normal gas pressure would be restored, warning that the power outage could persist beyond the next 24 hours if the technical issues were not resolved quickly.
The prolonged outage is expected to impact households, commercial centres and manufacturers in the Aba Ring-fence Area, widely regarded as one of Nigeria’s busiest industrial clusters and home to thousands of small and medium-scale enterprises that depend on stable electricity for production.
Reacting to the development, Abuja-based engineer Uche Elugwu described the situation as unfortunate, noting that residents and businesses who had come to rely on improved electricity supply from Aba Power were now bearing the consequences of challenges outside the distribution company’s control.
“It is regrettable that the reliable electricity supply enjoyed by the people of Aba is being interrupted by gas supply challenges beyond the control of Aba Power,” he said.
The latest disruption underscores the vulnerability of Nigeria’s electricity sector to constraints in gas supply, with industry stakeholders warning that sustained investments in gas infrastructure will be critical to improving the reliability of power generation across the country.