Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, CEO, Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC)
Nigeria closed out an eight-month push to overhaul how it sells drilling rights, and the results suggest the strategy is working: explorers who once shunned the country’s remote frontier territories are now lining up for a piece of them.
The Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) wrapped its Commercial Bid Conference this week, marking the end of a bidding round that regulators say restored investor confidence in Africa’s largest oil producer at a moment when the industry has been consolidating around fewer, safer bets.
The scale of interest surprised even the Commission. Fifty blocks were put up across seven terrains, ranging from the well-picked-over Niger Delta to basins that international majors have mostly ignored for decades — the Chad Basin and the Benue Trough among them. Roughly 300 companies expressed initial interest. After prequalification screening pared that group to 196, some 143 firms ultimately filed 200 technical and commercial bids covering 37 of the 50 blocks on offer. Thirteen blocks drew no bids at all.
Unsurprisingly, the deepest pool of interest remained in familiar territory. The Niger Delta’s shallow-water acreage was the most fought-over terrain, with 18 blocks awarded, followed by 16 in the onshore Delta. But regulators pointed to a different number as the round’s real headline: 15 blocks awarded across four frontier basins — Benin, Anambra, Chad and Benue Trough — regions NUPRC described as having never before attracted this level of bidder appetite.
