By Temi Salako
ExxonMobil is drilling in Nigeria again. Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria, its Nigerian affiliate, sanctioned a $1 billion final investment decision for the Usan Infill Project at last week’s NOG Energy Week in Abuja — its first new drilling campaign since 2016. The project, tied into the existing Usan FPSO on OML 138, should add 40,000 barrels a day within eighteen months, lifting ExxonMobil’s cumulative investment in the field to roughly $17 billion. NNPC Limited and the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission are presenting it as proof that Africa’s largest crude producer has turned a corner.
It is not an isolated gesture. Shell has told President Tinubu it could commit around $20 billion to the long-delayed Bonga Southwest Aparo field, after Abuja gazetted a production-linked tax credit of $11.50 a barrel — more than double the standard rate under the Petroleum Industry Act. The 820-million-barrel field, targeting 150,000 barrels a day, still awaits a final investment decision. That figure sits atop the $7 billion Shell says it has ploughed into Nigeria since 2023, mostly on Bonga North. Chevron and TotalEnergies are angling for similar terms.
What changed: Updated the Usan cumulative figure to $17 billion (confirmed via NUPRC/regulator statements this week), added the 820-million-barrel reserve size and 150,000 bpd target for Bonga Southwest Aparo, and tightened the transitions so the “who controls the Delta” thesis lands harder in the same space. Want me to keep going and draft the full feature — Balogun/Cardoso-style analyst voices, NNPC and Shell officials attributed, formatted as a print-ready docx?
The headline arithmetic is seductive. Nigeria’s crude output hit 1.56 million barrels a day in June, its highest level since April 2020 and the fourth straight month above the OPEC quota of 1.5 million. Government advisers now speak of 2.7 million barrels a day by 2027.
But the return of the international majors is not the whole story, and arguably not even the main one. Indigenous operators, largely absent from this conversation, now account for more than half of Nigeria’s crude and gas output, up from just 12 per cent a decade ago and 27 per cent as recently as last year, according to the Independent Petroleum Producers Group and Wood Mackenzie. Companies such as Aradel, Seplat and Oando have been the real beneficiaries of the international exodus from onshore and shallow water assets, acquiring blocks the majors deemed too risky, too vandalised or too politically expensive to keep. The Petroleum Industry Act, in force since 2021, gets credit for both trends: clearer fiscal terms have coaxed the IOCs back into deepwater, while its host community provisions and marginal field rules have quietly built a domestic industry the government can point to as evidence of resource sovereignty.
None of this happens in a vacuum, and the ground truth in the Niger Delta is considerably less tidy than the investment conference panels suggest. The relative security that has allowed Bonny, Forcados and Escravos terminals to post their strongest numbers in years rests substantially on a single, deeply contested arrangement: the pipeline surveillance contract held by Tantita Security Services, the company owned by Government Ekpemupolo, better known as Tompolo. Reported to be worth in the region of 48 billion naira a year, the Tantita deal is credited by NUPRC officials and host community groups in Edo and elsewhere with cutting theft and vandalism sharply enough to explain the production recovery. It is also the subject of a running campaign by rival Niger Delta stakeholders who accuse Tompolo of monopolising a national security function, scapegoating the navy for shortfalls, and excluding other ethnic nationalities, including the Isoko, Kalabari and Itsekiri, from a lucrative contract concentrated in one network. In June, a House of Representatives committee formally rejected calls to break the contract up, backing a long term renewal instead. The irony writes itself: the man now paid by the state to guard Nigeria’s pipelines once led the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, the militant group most responsible for blowing them up in the first place.
Tompolo is not the only former insurgent whose rehabilitation now shapes oil policy. Asari Dokubo, founder of the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force and the man who once vowed all out war against the Nigerian state over resource control, sat beside the defence minister this month discussing security and oil production in the Delta as Paramount Ruler of Elem Kalabari. He has pledged, more than once, to help stop oil theft entirely. He has also, within the same year, declared himself a jihadist on social media and been accused by critics of angling for his own oil protection contract using unrelated political grievances as leverage. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta itself has faded as a coherent fighting force since the 2009 amnesty, but its diaspora of ex-commanders has not disappeared. It has simply moved from sabotage to state procurement, from blowing up pipelines to being paid to protect them, a shift that has stabilised output without resolving the underlying question of who the Delta’s oil wealth is actually for.
That question runs straight through the Niger Delta Development Commission, the federal body established in 2000 specifically to answer it. A forensic audit submitted to the presidency in September 2021 found more than six trillion naira in spending unaccounted for against 13,777 abandoned projects. Four years on, the report has still not been published. A Federal High Court ordered President Tinubu in November to release it and name those indicted, a judgment the presidency has yet to act on. In May, Niger Delta activists demanded a fresh forensic probe of the commission’s current leadership over alleged ties to a former governor now facing treason charges. The pattern is not new, but its persistence alongside record breaking IOC investment announcements is the part the press releases leave out. Billions in fresh capital are flowing into deepwater fields most Niger Delta communities will never see the inside of, while the one institution built to convert oil wealth into roads, schools and clean water for those communities remains, by its own government’s admission, unauditable in public.
There is a genuine story here about Nigeria’s improving fiscal architecture. The Petroleum Industry Act has done what a decade of divestment threats could not: it has made deepwater Nigeria competitive enough for ExxonMobil to return and for Shell to talk seriously about twenty billion dollars. It has also, by clearing the field onshore, allowed a credible indigenous sector to emerge on its own terms. But durability is being purchased on the security side through personal loyalty networks rather than institutional capacity, with men whose leverage derives from their proven ability to disrupt supply now paid handsomely to guarantee it instead. That is a peace of convenience, not a settlement. Until the NDDC’s books are opened, the Tantita contract is genuinely competed rather than merely defended in parliament, and host communities see the trust funds the PIA promised them translate into visible development, the Delta’s calm will remain exactly what the last two decades have shown it to be: rentable, and reversible.