Bankability Challenge with Capital Mobilisation for Oil and Gas Projects.
Nigeria has the resources. The country holds about 37.5 billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves and 209 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves, making it one of Africa’s most significant gas markets. What Nigeria has struggled to mobilise is capital. Between 2021 and 2025, Final Investment Decisions (FIDs) across Nigerian oil and gas projects amounted to less than $5 billion. That is a long way from the roughly $60 billion required to meet the ambitions of the Decade of Gas and support the development of assets changing hands as international oil companies continue to divest. The constraint is increasingly financial rather than geological. There are projects with reserves, licences, infrastructure and credible sponsors that still cannot raise the long-term capital required to develop them. The missing ingredient is a financing structure that gives lenders enough confidence to commit money for the life of the project. That is the bankability challenge.
Why Traditional Financing Is No Longer Working.
For decades, Nigerian oil and gas development relied largely on three sources of capital: international oil company balance sheets, reserve-based lending from banks, and cash generated from existing production. Each of those sources now faces significant constraints.
