Verheijen: Nigeria’s subsequent barrel should construct the nation, not simply output

The Special Adviser to the President on Oil and Gas, Olu Arowolo Verheijen, has urged the trade to show funding restoration into nationwide productive energy, saying the following barrel “must help build our country.”

Delivering the keynote on the forty fourth Annual International Conference and Exhibition of the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists (NAPE) on Monday, Verheijen mentioned the nation should now transfer from altering the funding story to altering the manufacturing story, and thru it, the financial story.

She cited the IMA gasoline discipline, found in 1973 however taken to ultimate funding choice solely in September 2026.

“The gas did not suddenly appear in 2026,” she mentioned, arguing that what modified was the funding situations, together with fiscal design, business negotiation and opening third-party gasoline provide to NLNG.

Ubeta and Bonga North reached ultimate funding choices in 2024.

Verheijen set out three duties: exploration, native functionality and adaptive know-how.

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

She challenged operators to convey ahead programmes that replenish their portfolios, establish the federal government choices wanted to unlock them, and present the capital and execution plans behind them.

On native functionality, she mentioned the rise of Nigerian independents affords an opportunity to drive onshore and shallow-water progress, however solely with sound governance, sturdy stability sheets and technical competence.

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

She urged wider use of higher seismic interpretation, reservoir modelling, digital monitoring and methane measurement, including that synthetic intelligence is not going to take away the necessity for good information and sound judgement.

Verheijen warned that developments in Guyana and throughout Africa imply Nigeria should compete on the standard of its proposition.

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

She tied oil and gasoline to industrialisation and power-sector reform. “Energy poverty is also an industrialisation problem,” she mentioned, including {that a} gasoline discipline is “only as bankable as the customer at the other end of the pipe.”

Resolving legacy energy money owed, bettering metering and focusing on help to weak shoppers, she mentioned, are a part of the identical job.

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

She closed by urging that younger professionals shouldn’t “wait a working lifetime” to see the nation’s promise put to work.