Nigeria’s oil and gas industry is finally attracting money again. Now it needs to find people who know what to do with it.
That’s the warning from Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, Commission Chief Executive of the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, who says a decade of falling investment gutted the country’s bench of geoscientists, petroleum engineers and other technical specialists, and the industry risks squandering its rebound if it can’t rebuild that pipeline fast enough.
“Training curricula need to evolve,” Eyesan told an audience at the Oil and Gas Trainers Association of Nigeria’s Human Capacity Development Conference and Expo, held at the Petroleum Training Institute in Effurun, Delta State. Nigeria, she said, remains behind where it needs to be in building the skills a fast-changing industry now demands.
Annual oil and gas investment in Nigeria peaked at roughly $24 billion in 2014. By 2023, it had collapsed to about $2 billion, a decline of more than 90 percent. That contraction didn’t just stall drilling and exploration. It hollowed out the workforce behind it.
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