Oladayo Williams, managing director of Tetracore Energy Group, talks to The Energy Year about the growing appetite for CNG among industrial, power and transportation companies in Nigeria and the company’s integrated supply model in West Africa.
Tetracore Energy Group is a developer of gas and power infrastructure.
- CNG adoption is reaching a tipping point in Nigeria as industrial companies and logistics operators shift to CNG to reduce exposure to fuel price volatility, signalling a structural shift in the country’s fuel mix.
- Infrastructure and demand growth are reinforcing each other in Nigeria. CNG uptake is incentivising new investments in compression, distribution and refuelling networks, and better supply-side infrastructure is improving access for potential consumers and encouraging adoption.
- The trend has the potential to spread regionally at scale, with the West Africa Gas Pipeline serving as a backbone for gas companies to grow cross-border distribution businesses.
Could you provide an overview of how your Atakobo Industrial Park in Ogun has evolved operationally and its role in your strategy?
Tetracore Energy Group started as a natural gas distribution company, developing pipeline infrastructure to serve key industrial customers. However, in the past three years, we have evolved significantly beyond that. We are now a fully integrated energy company, with one of the biggest downstream supply portfolios in the country, servicing both the industrial and commercial sectors.
The Atakobo Industrial Park in Ogun has been central to that transformation. We started off with a CNG mother station with an initial capacity of 87,782 cubic metres (3.1 mcf) per day and expanded to 215,208 cubic metres (7.6 mcf) per day within 18 months. The facility supplies industrial and power generation companies, as well as vehicles and trucks, supporting Nigeria’s national gas transition policy.
The hub is also now home to Tetracore’s first-ever IPP, a 6-MW facility with the potential to be ramped up to 100 MW and connected to a 45-kilometre distribution line. We also have other projects coming up in the hub that will utilise natural gas, such as a 5,000-bpd GTL facility, a data centre and a 20-tonne-per-day cashew processing facility.
The importance of this hub is that it anchors our integrated model, which is not just about supplying gas but about building an ecosystem. Ogun’s position as a supply centre allows us to scale while responding directly to market needs, making it a cornerstone of our broader growth strategy.
What trends are you seeing in CNG adoption, and how are you responding?
There is much appetite for CNG in Nigeria today, particularly among logistics operators. Companies are shifting away from the price volatility of traditional fuels and towards more stable, domestic energy sources. Demand is increasing rapidly, so we are complementing our Ogun site with compression capacities in Benin, increasing our daughter station from two locations to five locations in Q1 2026. Currently, we have a capacity of 328,000 cubic metres per day across our key locations.
It is clear that uptake is increasing, and infrastructure must keep pace. This is influencing our investment decisions, as the more adoption we see, the more we are encouraged to invest in building stations and deploying mobile refuelling units. A virtuous cycle has emerged in which CNG adoption drives infrastructure growth, and infrastructure growth facilitates adoption.
We pride ourselves on being one of Nigeria’s largest vehicular natural gas suppliers, a position we have achieved thanks to our aggressive and innovative approach. The growth of CNG is no longer potential; it is happening, and our operations are evolving to capture that opportunity.
Do you see potential to obtain similar results elsewhere in West Africa?
In Ghana, we have developed a CNG facility that is a key milestone towards demonstrating our ability to replicate our model outside Nigeria. We are also exploring other West African markets, including Sierra Leone, Gabon, Gambia and Guinea. We are licensed shippers on the West Africa Gas Pipeline, and the idea is to leverage Nigeria’s abundant gas resources to deliver valuable fuel across the region. The West African Gas Pipeline will prove critical to moving gas across borders, but rather than on transportation, our focus is on building distribution infrastructure for gas consumers in new markets.
Besides the capital, we can also bring regulatory experience. We are familiar with Nigeria’s framework, which has evolved to reinforce investor confidence, and that know-how is also an exportable asset. We are already a part of discussions in Ghana for developing regulations that support investment and long-term growth. Our regional expansion strategy is not opportunistic; it is about building interconnected energy systems across West Africa in such a way that supply, infrastructure and demand are aligned to support sustainable growth in the entire region.
What are the main challenges you expect in this expansion?
The biggest challenge is financing. The cost of capital in Nigeria remains high, and that impacts our ability to scale. We have often had to deploy internal resources to initiate projects and gain traction before financiers have been willing to participate on cost-effective terms.
Feedstock pricing is another challenge. As a downstream player, we depend on upstream suppliers, and their costs are influenced by exploration dynamics. For our margins to hold, natural gas needs to remain competitive against other fuels, and multiple cost factors come into play. While the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority is working to stabilise gas pricing, better alignment is needed between the upstream and downstream. Pricing must ensure affordability while maintaining production and supply incentives.
Can you comment on your partnerships with Dangote Cement and Huawei?
Dangote Cement was our first major customer in the vehicular CNG space. They operate a large fleet of CNG trucks, and we supply gas for their entire logistics chain, partly through fixed infrastructure and partly through mobile refuelling units that help extend their market access.
With Huawei, we are developing a synthetic diesel plant and a 20-MW gas-powered data centre within our Ogun hub. The idea is to integrate digital infrastructure directly into our energy ecosystem, rather than treating it as a separate component. By co-locating the data centre with our gas and power assets, we can provide a stable energy supply and create more value across more sectors from within the same location.