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Nigeria’s Oil Minister Says Crude Output Has Jumped More Than 80% Since 2023
Nigeria’s Minister of State for Petroleum Resources says the country’s crude oil and condensate production has climbed past 1.824 million barrels a day, representing an increase of more than 80 percent since President Bola Tinubu’s administration took office in 2023.
Senator Heineken Lokpobiri made the disclosure during an interactive session with media executives from the Niger Delta region, held at the Bayelsa State Government House. He said the figure comes from the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission’s latest weekly production report, and he was direct about the scale of the turnaround, telling the gathered journalists that when this government took over, Nigeria’s crude oil and condensate production stood at less than one million barrels a day. Measured against that starting point, he said, today’s output represents over 80 percent growth from where the country began in 2023.
The comments came after Susie Ogun, chief executive of Rehoboth Media, commended President Tinubu for what she described as greater stability and progress across Nigeria’s petroleum sector, pointing specifically to the reforms, rising production, fresh investment and renewed activity that have characterized the industry over the past three years.
Lokpobiri tied much of that turnaround to a near-total collapse in sector investment that preceded the current administration. He told the media executives that before this government came into office, Nigeria’s oil and gas sector had gone more than a decade without meaningful new investment, and that the country had recorded essentially no seismic exploration activity for over twenty years. The consequence, he said, is that virtually every oil well currently producing in Nigeria today was actually drilled back in the 1960s and 1970s, a striking admission about just how little fresh drilling activity had taken place in the decades leading up to Tinubu’s presidency.
That drought in investment has reversed sharply, according to the minister. He said Nigeria now accounts for roughly 60 percent of all oil and gas investment flowing into the African continent, a dramatic shift for a sector that had been starved of capital for years. Drilling activity tells a similar story. Lokpobiri said the country had fewer than 10 active drilling rigs when the current administration began, a number that has since climbed past 70. He added useful context on just how capital-intensive that kind of expansion actually is, noting that drilling a single well costs between $25 million and $30 million onshore, and anywhere from $80 million to $100 million offshore, figures that underscore the scale of capital commitment behind the rig count increase he’s describing.
The ownership structure of Nigeria’s oil production has also shifted meaningfully during this period. Lokpobiri said indigenous Nigerian oil companies now account for about 60 percent of the country’s crude oil production, a sharp reversal from the earlier era when international oil companies controlled roughly 90 percent of output. That transition has been driven largely by a series of divestment deals in which multinational oil majors sold off onshore and shallow-water assets to Nigerian firms, deals that have handed local companies a far larger stake in the country’s upstream sector than they held just a few years ago.
Beyond the production numbers themselves, Lokpobiri pointed to a tangible fiscal payoff for Nigeria’s state governments. He said the increased oil revenue flowing through federal allocations has allowed 27 states, which previously struggled to pay workers’ salaries on time, to now comfortably cover both salaries and pensions while also funding capital projects, a claim that ties the upstream production gains directly to improved government finances at the subnational level.
The minister also defended the broader policy direction that’s accompanied the production recovery, including the removal of fuel subsidies, framing it as a policy that had become unavoidable given the fiscal strain it was placing on the federal government. He noted that before the subsidy was removed, the government had been spending roughly ₦18.4 billion a day to keep fuel prices artificially low, at a time when the exchange rate stood at ₦448 to the dollar, a cost he described as simply no longer sustainable.
The latest figures build on a recovery that regulators have been tracking steadily throughout the year. NUPRC’s own monthly data had shown crude oil and condensate production averaging 1.68 million barrels a day in August, with daily output during that month ranging between 1.64 million and 1.71 million barrels. A weekly reading reaching 1.824 million barrels a day, as Lokpobiri cited, would represent a newer and notably stronger data point than that August monthly average, consistent with the kind of week-to-week fluctuation that’s common in oil production reporting, where individual weeks can run meaningfully above or below a month’s overall average depending on terminal performance and any operational issues affecting specific fields.
Whether that stronger weekly figure marks a genuine and sustained step up in output, or simply reflects a particularly strong short stretch within a longer, more gradual recovery, should become clearer as NUPRC’s subsequent weekly and monthly reports are published in the coming weeks. For now, Lokpobiri’s figures give the Tinubu administration a fresh data point to point to as evidence that the investment, drilling and divestment reforms it has pursued since 2023 are translating into measurable gains in the oil sector that remains central to Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings and federal budget.
