Retailing stations operated by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) would have the Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) by December, Group Managing Director (GMD) Malam Mele Kyari, said on Monday.

According to him, the deployment will be extended to independent retail stations as the NNPC plans to replicate the plants in about 200 to 300 non-NNPC owned petrol stations by the end of 2021.

Kyari, who spoke with reporters in Abuja after “The Value chain Third Annual Lecture & Awards, said: “We are deploying in all our stations. Like we said, by December we will deploy it in all NNPC stations. We would have deployed it to all our retail stations. We are expanding and by next year, we will see this deployed in 200 to 300 stations across the country, not only NNPC stations.”

The lecture has “The role of media in the Nigerian Petroleum Industry Reform & Investment” as its theme.

On the topic, Kyari said the new media defies what the corporation does. He decried the setback that adversarial journalism and fake news pose to national development and urged the conventional media to serve as a veritable validation source to the social media news.

The NNPC boss said: “There is a journalism now that has come. It is called new media or fake news. Today, journalism is on people’s telephone handset. You can have an individual not a corporate entity with a million audience. There is no control over what he does.

“So, companies should refocus on the new media as wrong information is planted on the minds of the people and you will never able to take it out.”

He sought a synergy between the corporation and the media in order to have an avid understanding for exactly what the corporation does.

Presenting his paper, the African Petroleum Producers’ Organisation (APPO) Secretary-General, Dr. Omar Farouk Ibrahim, noted that most of the journalists covering the oil and gas beats, lack insight of the industry and the issues involved.

He bemoaned the dearth of entering qualification and standard that permeates the Nigerian media industry.

Ibrahim urged the National Assembly to address the issues of Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) and that lawmakers should enact a law to be called Energy Journalists Fund.

According to him, petroleum is a critical sector, which its information deserves a special attention as such a fund in the rank of the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) is desirable for the promotion of oil and gas journalism in Nigeria.

The Technical Adviser, Gas Business & Policy Implementation to the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Justice Derefaka, said the sector is so technical for the understanding of even engineers and to say the least, the journalists. (The Nation)