Does Natural Gas Utilisation Improve Economic Wellbeing? Empirical Evidence from Nigeria

This study examined the effects of natural gas utilised on per capita income measured in term of purchasing power parity (economic wellbeing) in Nigeria from 2010 to 2020 using quarterly data sourced from International Energy Agency and the Central Bank of Nigeria. The Autoregressive and Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique was used to analyse the data after conducting descriptive statistics, trend analysis and unit roots test on the data. The result shows that in the long run, gas demanded for power and transport sectors as well as its cost contributed to a decline in per capita income which ultimately hampered economic wellbeing in Nigeria. On the other side, households and industrial sector demand for gas improved per capita income and, over time promoted long run economic wellbeing in Nigeria. The study also found an insignificant nexus between demand for gas by the various sectors and economic wellbeing in the long run. In the short run, gas utilised for power generation and the industrial sector had negative and significant impact on economic wellbeing while households demand for natural gas significantly improve economic wellbeing by increasing per capita income in Nigeria. Based on these results, the study concludes that gas demand had serious implication on economic wellbeing in the short run than long run. Also gas demand utilised by households had positive effect on economic wellbeing both in the long and short runs.  Consequent upon the findings, the study recommends, increase in gas demand for household and industrial use by enhancing a competitive price for natural gas in order to enhance sustainable economic wellbeing in Nigeria.&nbsp

ATLAS

% ATLAS \\ \\ ATLAS is a general-purpose experiment for recording proton-proton collisions at LHC. The ATLAS collaboration consists of 144 participating institutions (June 1998) with more than 1750~physicists and engineers (700 from non-Member States). The detector design has been optimized to cover the largest possible range of LHC physics: searches for Higgs bosons and alternative schemes for the spontaneous symmetry-breaking mechanism; searches for supersymmetric particles, new gauge bosons, leptoquarks, and quark and lepton compositeness indicating extensions to the Standard Model and new physics beyond it; studies of the origin of CP violation via high-precision measurements of CP-violating B-decays; high-precision measurements of the third quark family such as the top-quark mass and decay properties, rare decays of B-hadrons, spectroscopy of rare B-hadrons, and $B ^0 _{s}$-mixing. \\ \\The ATLAS dectector, shown in the Figure includes an inner tracking detector inside a 2~T~solenoid providing an axial field, electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters outside the solenoid and in the forward regions, and barrel and end-cap air-core-toroid muon spectrometers. The precision measurements for photons, electrons, muons and hadrons, and identification of photons, electrons, muons, $\tau$-leptons and b-quark jets are performed over $| \eta |$ < 2.5. The complete hadronic energy measurement extends over $| \eta |$ < 4.7. \\ \\The inner tracking detector consists of straw drift tubes interleaved with transition radiators for robust pattern recognition and electron identification, and several layers of semiconductor strip and pixel detectors providing high-precision space points. \\ \\The e.m. calorimeter is a lead-Liquid Argon sampling calorimeter with an integrated preshower detector and a presampler layer immediately behind the cryostat wall for energy recovery. The end-cap hadronic calorimeters also use Liquid Argon technology, with copper absorber plates. The end-cap cryostats house the e.m., hadronic and forward calorimeters (tungsten-Liquid Argon sampling). The barrel hadronic calorimeter is an iron-scintillating tile sampling calorimeter with longitudinal tile geometry. \\ \\Air-core toroids are used for the muon spectrometer. Eight superconducting coils with warm voussoirs are used in the barrel region complemented with superconducting end-cap toroids in the forward regions. The toroids will be instrumented with Monitored Drift Tubes (Cathode Strip Chambers at large rapidity where there are high radiation levels). The muon trigger and second coordinate measurement for muon tracks are provide