Verheijen: Nigeria’s next barrel must build the country, not just output

Spread the word The Special Adviser to the President on Oil and Gas, Olu Arowolo Verheijen, has urged the industry to turn investment recovery into national productive strength, saying the next barrel “must help build our country.”

Delivering the keynote at the 44th Annual International Conference and Exhibition of the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists (NAPE) on Monday, Verheijen said the country must now move from changing the investment story to changing the production story, and through it, the economic story.

She cited the IMA gas field, discovered in 1973 but taken to final investment decision only in September 2026. 

“The gas did not suddenly appear in 2026,” she said, arguing that what changed was the investment conditions, including fiscal design, commercial negotiation and opening third-party gas supply to NLNG.

Ubeta and Bonga North reached final investment decisions in 2024.

Verheijen set out three responsibilities: exploration, local capability and adaptive technology. 

On exploration, she said Nigeria “cannot produce tomorrow what it does not discover, appraise or develop today.” 

She challenged operators to bring forward programmes that replenish their portfolios, identify the government decisions needed to unlock them, and show the capital and execution plans behind them.

On local capability, she said the rise of Nigerian independents offers a chance to drive onshore and shallow-water growth, but only with sound governance, strong balance sheets and technical competence.

“Local content should leave Nigeria more capable after a project than before it began,” she said.

She urged wider use of better seismic interpretation, reservoir modelling, digital monitoring and methane measurement, adding that artificial intelligence will not remove the need for good data and sound judgement.

Verheijen warned that developments in Guyana and across Africa mean Nigeria must compete on the quality of its proposition. 

“A disruption elsewhere may create an opening. It cannot be our business plan,” she said.

She tied oil and gas to industrialisation and power-sector reform. “Energy poverty is also an industrialisation problem,” she said, adding that a gas field is “only as bankable as the customer at the other end of the pipe.” 

Resolving legacy power debts, improving metering and targeting support to vulnerable consumers, she said, are part of the same task.

Nigerians, she said, are entitled to ask when reform will improve their lives. “A business cannot run on a policy announcement,” she added.

She closed by urging that young professionals should not “wait a working lifetime” to see the country’s promise put to work.