By Abdulazeez Toheeb Olawale
On September 13, 2026, a Toyota Camry fitted with a retrofitted gas cylinder exploded while refuelling at a NIPCO filling station on Airport Road, Abuja. No one died, but the blast tore through a forecourt and sent yet another jolt of fear through a public already being asked to trust a fuel most Nigerians had never used a year earlier. The National Automotive Design and Development Council later confirmed what has become a grimly familiar preliminary finding: the vehicle had been fitted with an extra cylinder that was neither approved nor suitable for automotive CNG use.
It was not an isolated case. Just five months earlier, in April 2026, a CNG-related explosion in Kaduna prompted government reassurances that investigations were ongoing. Before that, an explosion at a filling station in Benin City left three people injured, traced back to what officials called an unapproved, modified cylinder. Each incident has followed the same script: an explosion, a statement from a regulatory agency blaming unauthorised technicians or substandard parts, a renewed call for motorists to use accredited centres — and then the cycle continues.
Nigeria is in the middle of one of its most ambitious energy transitions in decades. Since President Bola Tinubu removed the fuel subsidy in his very first speech in office in 2023, the government has pushed compressed natural gas as the answer to a cost-of-living crisis at the pump, launching the Presidential Compressed Natural Gas Initiative to convert vehicles en masse. The ambition is enormous: over one million natural-gas-powered vehicles on Nigerian roads by 2027. But behind the ribbon-cuttings and conversion targets sits a quieter, more dangerous story — a booming, thinly policed conversion industry where the gap between an accredited workshop and a roadside mechanic with a wrench and a secondhand cylinder can be the difference between a full tank and a fireball.
A Market Growing Faster Than Its Rules: When NADDC first began accrediting CNG conversion centres, the entire formal industry consisted of about 30 licensed workshops nationwide, according to the Council’s own figures from late 2024. Around the same period, industry data cited by NADDC — drawn from Autogas Africa — put the total conversion capacity of the country’s roughly 120 conversion centres and 466 trained technicians at a minimum of two vehicles per workshop per day. By mid-2026, the picture had shifted again: the Presidential CNG Initiative’s private-sector partner, Pi-CNG, was citing more than 300 accredited centres and over $2 billion in cumulative investment across three years.
On paper, that is rapid, encouraging growth. In practice, it means Nigeria’s official conversion infrastructure has been racing to keep pace with public demand triggered by subsidy removal — demand that has not waited for the formal system to catch up. Motorists desperate to escape petrol prices have had every incentive to seek out whoever offers the cheapest, fastest conversion, accredited or not. Government officials have openly admitted this dynamic is driving the safety crisis: the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources (Gas), Ekperikpo Ekpo, attributed the wave of vehicle explosions directly to the use of unverified and uncertified conversion processes, noting that many of the vehicles involved had been converted by roadside technicians.
Why a Cylinder Is Not Just a Cylinder: CNG is stored in vehicles at extremely high pressure — a fact regulators repeat often, and one that ordinary motorists have limited means of independently verifying. As the Federal Government itself has acknowledged, the quality of the cylinder, the way it is installed, and how the vehicle is subsequently maintained are all critical to whether that pressure stays safely contained or becomes a hazard. A cylinder manufactured and rated for industrial or cooking-gas use, repurposed into a vehicle by a technician without the training or diagnostic equipment to assess it, is not a cheaper version of a certified automotive cylinder — it is, mechanically, an entirely different risk category.
This is precisely the distinction that keeps surfacing after every explosion. Pi-CNG & EV’s communications lead, addressing the Abuja incident, stressed that every cylinder installed in a vehicle must be manufactured and certified specifically for automotive CNG use, and called on vehicle owners to resist the temptation to patronise unqualified technicians or unapproved components purely to save money.
The Standards Organisation of Nigeria has separately warned the public against substandard and uncertified cylinders, insisting its conformity assessment schemes are designed to prevent the import, manufacture and use of such equipment. Yet these warnings, repeated after nearly every reported incident, point to a regulatory system that is reactive rather than preventive — responding to explosions rather than reliably stopping the conditions that cause them before they happen.
Public confidence has taken a visible hit. Nairametrics reporting from September 2026 captured the mood among ordinary motorists bluntly: one vehicle owner said he would not convert his taxi even if he had the money, because he could not risk an explosion; another dismissed assurances that CNG is different from other gas entirely, saying “gas is gas” and that he was not willing to risk his life. These are not the words of a public reassured by press statements — they are the words of people who have watched the same explosion story repeat itself enough times to stop believing the fix is coming.
That scepticism carries an economic cost the government cannot easily absorb. CNG conversion only delivers on its central promise — insulating households and commercial drivers from petrol price shocks — if enough vehicle owners actually convert. Commercial operators, who stand to save an estimated ₦40,000 a month on fuel according to Pi-CNG’s own figures, are precisely the demographic the government most needs to win over, and precisely the demographic most exposed to cost-cutting shortcuts, since commercial drivers operate on razor-thin margins and every naira saved on a cheaper, unaccredited conversion is a naira not spent elsewhere.
Regulation on Paper, Enforcement on the Road: The regulatory architecture on paper is not thin. NADDC accredits and licenses conversion workshops; the Standards Organisation of Nigeria certifies kits and cylinders against a safety policy built on 80 separate standards and regulations; the Federal Road Safety Corps is tasked with stopping converted vehicles that lack legal certification from plying Nigerian roads; and NADDC has begun rolling out a QR-code system so that only vehicles converted at certified workshops can access CNG at official filling stations at all.
The weak point is what happens between those layers. A QR-code system built to lock uncertified vehicles out of official refuelling stations does nothing to stop a roadside technician from installing a repurposed cylinder in the first place — it only affects whether that vehicle can later buy gas at an official pump, assuming enforcement is consistent, which multiple explosions suggest it has not been. Meanwhile the FRSC’s mandate to intercept uncertified vehicles depends on roadside inspection capacity that has not been scaled anywhere near the pace of the conversion boom itself. NADDC’s own director-general, Joseph Osanipin, has acknowledged the core problem directly: workshops that do not meet basic requirements will not be certified and, in theory, will not be able to access CNG at gas stations — a statement that implicitly concedes such workshops are currently operating and converting vehicles regardless.
Abdulazeez Toheeb Olawale is a Public Affairs Analyst.
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