Nigeria’s state-owned NNPC Ltd. began drilling for oil and gas on Tuesday at a field with 1 billion barrels of reserves in northern Nigeria as the nation aims to produce petroleum outside of the Niger Delta for the first time.
The finding of crude oil, gas, and condensate in commercial quantities was initially reported by NNPC Ltd in 2019 in the Kolmani region between the states of Bauchi and Gombe in northeastern Nigeria, a region that is grappling with an Islamic insurgency.
According to President Muhammadu Buhari, Kolmani Oil Prospecting Leases 809 and 810 had more than 1 billion barrels of oil reserves and 500 billion cubic feet of gas.
The Kolmani project is being developed by the NNPC, local company Sterling Global Oil, and New Nigeria Development Commission, a conglomerate owned by 19 states in northern Nigeria. No oil major is engaged.
At a ceremony to kick off the oil project, Buhari stated, “It is therefore to the credit of this administration that at a time when there are almost zero appetites for investment in fossil energy, coupled with the location constraints, we are able to attract investment of over $3 billion to this project.”
Nigeria has been looking for oil in frontier basins in the Country’s primarily impoverished north for years, including the Lake Chad Basin, which is the center of the Islamic insurgency.
In the troubled Niger Delta, where militants have in the past blown up pipelines and charged oil corporations with abandoning people, Buhari asked the NNPC and its partners to collaborate with local communities and learn from that region.
More than 60 years ago, oil was initially discovered in the Niger Delta.
Nigerian oil companies are pulling out of onshore projects to concentrate on offshore drilling, due to rising insecurity and oil theft, which has caused a drop in production and cost the nation its position as the top oil producer in Africa.
