The Midstream and Downstream Gas Infrastructure Fund (MDGIF) has said it leveraged ₦671 billion in public funds to attract ₦1.6 trillion in private investment into Nigeria’s midstream and downstream gas infrastructure.
The fund said the investment is supporting 31 projects and 205 infrastructure assets across the country, with the projects having the capacity to deliver about 475 million standard cubic feet (scf) of gas daily to the domestic market when fully operational.
The Executive Director MDGIF, Oluwole Adama who made the disclosure while delivering the keynote address titled, “Derisking Domestic Gas Infrastructure” at the 2026 Annual Conference of the Association of Energy Correspondents, Abuja FCT (AECAF) on Thursday.
Adama noted that the leverage reflected MDGIF’s core mandate of using public funds to reduce investment risks and crowd in private capital.
He said: “The fund is a public fund, and we see platforms like this as an opportunity to come and account and state: ‘This is what we are doing.’”
Represented by the Director, Strategy, Research and Deal Origination at MDGIF, Engr. Elvis Duruji, he explained that MDGIF was not established as a passive funding vehicle but as a catalytic platform designed to make projects bankable.
“In MDGIF we make projects bankable even projects that may not look financially viable, but have national strategic importance when we subject them to our channel, we end up making them viable.”
According to him, the fund’s interventions had already mobilised private capital at about 2.4 times its own contribution, demonstrating the impact of its derisking model.
“As we speak, MDGIF has used its own fund to mobilize 2.4X of the private counterparties so we’ve been able to use the fund we have to trigger and reduce the barrier to an extent where we now have many other private investors coming to partner with MDGIF, and this is the success story.”
The MDGIF ED added that the projects in the fund’s portfolio if fully executed, could raise domestic gas supply by about 25 per cent, based on current domestic production of about 1.9 billion scf daily.
“As of today, if all the projects about 30 partnership projects we’ve run into and 1,205 projects ongoing if they are executed today, they will be churning out about 475 million scf per day of gas into the domestic market.”
He identified high financing costs, infrastructure deficits, regulatory uncertainty and technical and commercial risks as major barriers preventing investment in the midstream sector.
On gas flaring, Adama disclosed that MDGIF had partnered four flare-out awardees whose projects, when operational, would monetise 444 million scf of gas daily that would otherwise have been flared, while eliminating about 2,845 metric tonnes of emissions per day.
He said the fund had partnered 30 unincorporated joint ventures and one incorporated equipment leasing company, covering 20 CNG mother stations, more than 80 CNG daughter stations and another 75 daughter stations through the leasing company.
Among its flagship interventions, Adama listed the 5 million scf mini-LNG plant by Topline Limited in Delta State which he described as Nigeria’s first indigenous mini-LNG project.
The project, he said, had spent three years seeking financing before MDGIF’s equity intervention helped unlock an InfraCredit guarantee.
“That particular project had gone around looking for funds for 3 years, but couldn’t get any. But when they partnered with MDGIF, today that facility will be commissioned in the next 2 to 3 months from now.”
Other projects highlighted included CNG infrastructure involving 20 universities, Ibile Oil and Gas in Lagos and Rolling Energy in Abuja.
Duruji said MDGIF’s ultimate objective was to absorb part of the early risks confronting gas projects, making them attractive to lenders and private investors.
“The missing link is vulnerability. MDGIF’s catalytic role is to price and absorb part of the early risk, turning uncertainty into bankability, bankability into private investment, and investment into operating gas infrastructures,” he added.
