Assessing Nigeria’s Readiness for Biodiesel and Renewable Energy Transition: Policies, Challenges, and Roadmap: A Review

Nigeria is at the crossroad of the quest to achieve sustainable energy security, biodiesel is a strategic pillar in the quest to transition to renewable energy. This review evaluates the country preparedness in terms of five dimensions: policy frameworks, the availability of feedstock, the technological preparedness, the financial viability, and the environmental considerations by integrating findings of more than 127 scholarly and policy sources classified as 93.7% scholarly articles, 3.15% government or policy reports, and 3.15% industry or NGO publications. A general consensus in the literature on the subject is that Nigeria has large quantities of biodiesel feedstocks including waste cooking oil, palm oil, and Jatropha curcas but institutional fragmentation, inconsistent policies and insufficient financing mechanisms are holding back large scale commercialization. The National Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Policy (NREEEP) and the Energy Transition Plan (ETP) show conceptual advancement, but their implementation is still poor, which yields a discrepancy between policy and practice. The most notable discovery made during this review is the instigation of institutional fragmentation as the most enduring structural obstacle and waste cooking oil as the most direct, long-term, and sustainable feedstock source. Nigeria should enhance inter-agency coordination, have quality and blending standards that are enforced, and develop incentives specific to the involvement of the private-sector in order to transition to credible biodiesel transition. The present paper represents an evidence-based roadmap of short-, medium-, and long-term steps of implementing biodiesel into the larger Nigerian renewable energy transition.