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"We Have Recovered 750,000 Barrels": Ojulari's NNPC Hits 1.71mbpd, Resolves OPL 245, Secures Dangote Stake in Stunning First Year
On 5 March 2026, President Bola Tinubu put his name to a settlement that ended one of the most intractable legal battles in global oil and gas — the 28-year OPL 245 dispute involving Shell, Eni, and the Nigerian government. On 28 April 2026, his hand-picked Group Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, Bashir Bayo Ojulari, released a one-year scorecard that converted that legal breakthrough — and a dozen other milestones — into a narrative of measurable industrial recovery. The headline figure: crude oil output, including condensates, rose to 1.71 million barrels per day between April 2025 and April 2026, the highest sustained level Nigeria has recorded in five years. Below that headline sits a ledger of achievements that, taken together, suggest Nigeria's national oil company is undergoing something rarer than a production rebound — it is undergoing an institutional transformation.
The arc of recovery is most starkly captured by a single data point. In 2022, at the nadir of Nigeria's oil production crisis, crude output collapsed to approximately 960,000 barrels per day — roughly half of the country's historic capacity and below the production levels of Angola and Libya. The 1.71 million bpd average represents a restoration of approximately 78 to 85 per cent of that lost capacity, a recovery of roughly 750,000 bpd — an amount that exceeds the entire production of several smaller African producers combined. "This is not an accident," Ojulari told a parliamentary roundtable on pipeline security in Abuja on 8 April. "It involved an integrated energy security model that combines legislative and executive policy alignment, actionable intelligence, kinetic deployment capabilities, regulatory oversight, industry cooperation, and community-embedded surveillance mechanisms." The difference between today's numbers and the dire statistics of three years ago is not merely technical; it is a function of political will applied with unusual consistency across the upstream security architecture.
The NEPL Record and the Deepwater Gas Breakthrough
Within the broader production recovery, NNPC Exploration and Production Limited (NEPL), the company's upstream subsidiary, achieved an all-time peak output of 365,000 barrels per day in December 2025 — the highest level the subsidiary has ever recorded. The milestone is significant because it represents not merely a restoration of lost output but an expansion into territory the company had never previously reached under its own operational control.
Equally consequential was the execution of new Production Sharing Contracts for oil mining leases PPL 2000 and PPL 2001. These agreements are the first in Nigerian history to include comprehensive terms specifically designed to facilitate the development of deepwater non-associated gas resources — a category of hydrocarbon that has long been identified as a strategic national asset but which successive administrations had failed to unlock. "The PSC terms are designed to make deepwater gas commercially viable for the first time," a company briefing note stated. For a country that sits on over 200 trillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves — one of the largest gas endowments on the planet — the PPL 2000/2001 framework may, in retrospect, prove to be Ojulari's most consequential upstream achievement.
OPL 245 Resolved: How an Asset That Paralysed Governments Became a Production-Sharing Contract
The resolution of the OPL 245 dispute deserves its own volume of Nigerian political economy. For 28 years — since the licence was first granted in 1998 and subsequently became embroiled in allegations of corruption, multiple court cases across jurisdictions including Italy and the United Kingdom, and a paralysis that prevented one of Nigeria's most promising deepwater assets from being developed — the Zabazaba/Etan field sat frozen in legal amber. Shell, which held a stake through its Nigerian subsidiary, walked away. Eni remained entangled. Neither the governments of Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Yar'Adua, Goodluck Jonathan, nor Muhammadu Buhari could resolve it permanently.
On 5 March 2026, Tinubu announced a settlement with Eni and Nigerian Agip Exploration Limited. The terms converted the disputed asset into new Production Sharing Contracts spanning four licences: PMLs 102 and 103, and PPLs 2011 and 2012. Ojulari, who was intimately involved in the negotiations, described the resolution as a moment of strategic national significance. The Special Adviser to the President on Energy, Olu Arowolo-Verheijen, said the settlement "removed one of the most prominent legacy risks in Nigeria's upstream sector and reinforced the country's commitment to predictable regulation, transparent governance, and commercially viable investment frameworks." Industry analysts estimate that OPL 245 could unlock up to 150,000 bpd of additional output once development begins in earnest — making it, by itself, a larger producer than Ghana's entire offshore output. The Guardian reported that the resolution "reduces legal uncertainty and supports future investment in deepwater exploration".
Gas Infrastructure: The AKK Pipeline Crosses the Niger, OB3 Goes Live
In July 2025, the Ajaokuta–Kaduna–Kano pipeline — a project conceived in 2008, repeatedly delayed, and described by one industry observer as "Nigeria's most frustrating infrastructure saga" — achieved its most significant engineering milestone: the completion of the River Niger crossing. The welding of the main line was completed in the same period, and Ojulari confirmed that the $2.8 billion pipeline would be activated for export in early 2026. "We have been able to complete the welding of the main line of the AKK pipeline. In summer, we were able to cross the River Niger, which was a struggle for many years," he said after an inspection tour in late 2025.
The pipeline will deliver gas across northern Nigeria, supplying power plants, fertiliser factories, and industrial parks from Kaduna to Kano. In the same period, NNPC commissioned the Assa North-Ohaji South gas processing plant and integrated it with the Obiafu-Obrikom-Oben (OB3) pipeline — a critical link connecting eastern gas fields to western demand centres. Gas supply reached 7.5 billion standard cubic feet per day in 2025, supported by new commercial agreements with Dangote Fertiliser, Dangote Cement, and the Dangote Refinery. A Network Exit Agreement was signed between NGIC and Dangote Fertiliser, and a separate supply deal was struck between NGML and Dangote Cement. The company added that it had signed new gas supply deals with CNG Ibese, while continuing optimisation work on the Soku gas pipeline infrastructure. The Gas Master Plan, launched in January 2026, was designed to guide long-term investment and infrastructure expansion across the entire value chain.
Refining: Securing the Dangote Stake and Fixing NNPC's Own Refineries
On the downstream front, Ojulari has pursued a dual-track strategy that balances strategic partnership with internal reform. NNPC consolidated its 7.25 per cent equity stake in the Dangote Refinery — an asset Dangote himself has described as the company's most significant external holding. "They are holding 7.25 per cent of the shares that we have here, which is more than the shares that Elon Musk has in Tesla, and they are holding that on behalf of Nigerians," Dangote said in February 2026. The refinery's public listing — a 10 per cent stake to be offered on the Nigerian Exchange later this year — will give ordinary Nigerians the opportunity to own a piece of the continent's largest refining asset.
The company has also sustained crude oil supply to the refinery under the "crude-for-naira" programme, a policy designed to reduce foreign exchange pressure and stabilise domestic fuel supply. Simultaneously, NNPC's own refineries have been transitioned to an Incorporated Joint Venture model, a structural reform intended to allow them to operate as independent commercial entities — self-financing, commercially viable, and freed from the constraints of government funding cycles.
Transparency, International Partnerships, and the Path to 2 Million bpd
On the governance front, NNPC has taken steps that would have been unthinkable five years ago. The company held its first-ever Group Earnings Call in November 2025 — a public disclosure of audited 2024 financial results that was widely hailed as a landmark in transparency for a company that operated for decades as an opaque state behemoth. Monthly performance reporting has been reinstated. Remittances to the Federation Account have been uninterrupted since July 2025. A new crude grade, Cawthorne, was launched, and the Oleum lubricant brand was expanded into the West African subregion. Strategic shipping partnerships with Stena Bulk and Sonangol strengthened the company's international trading footprint.
Ojulari has also articulated a quantified medium-term target: raising oil production to 2 million barrels per day by 2027 as part of a broader goal of attracting $30 billion in new investments by 2030. "The current milestone is not the ceiling of the improvement story, but potentially an intermediate point in a longer trajectory, contingent on continued execution," noted a Discovery Alert analysis of the NNPC data. The gap between the 1.84 million bpd episodic peak reached in March 2026 and the 1.71 million bpd sustained average is itself instructive — it reflects the reality that Nigerian production remains subject to intermittent disruptions, even as the underlying trajectory has shifted decisively upward.
The Challenges That Remain
Despite the momentum, the operational environment remains fragile. Crude theft, pipeline vandalism, and infrastructure bottlenecks continue to threaten production stability. In February 2026, production fell to approximately 1.31 million bpd due to turnaround maintenance and pipeline disruptions. Independent analysts note that sustaining the recovery will depend on continued security improvements, policy consistency, and the ability to attract the $30 billion in new investments the administration has targeted. Foreign exchange constraints also continue to shape the sector's performance, even as the crude-for-naira programme has mitigated some of the pressure on the downstream side.
Nevertheless, the convergence of security gains, infrastructure delivery, contractual reform, and transparency initiatives represents something Nigeria's oil sector has rarely experienced: a simultaneous improvement across multiple dimensions of performance. As Ojulari himself put it in his New Year message to staff: "We achieved. We drive the future." The numbers — 1.71 million bpd, sustained and rising — suggest the first half of that sentence is no longer an aspiration. The second half will determine whether his tenure is remembered as a fleeting recovery or a structural transformation.
From Recovery to Institutional Transformation
Bayo Ojulari's first year at the helm of NNPC has delivered the clearest signal yet that Nigeria's oil and gas sector can recover not merely through favourable market conditions but through deliberate, multi-dimensional reform. The OPL 245 resolution unlocked an asset frozen for 28 years. The AKK pipeline crossed a river that had defeated engineers for over a decade. Gas supply reached 7.5 billion cubic feet a day. The Dangote Refinery stake was consolidated. And crude production climbed back to levels that make Nigeria, once again, a credible force in global oil markets. The path to 2 million bpd is not assured, and the threats of theft, vandalism, and price volatility remain. But the direction of travel is clear — and for the first time in many years, it is not heading in the wrong direction.
Stay tuned to Unuevbo TV for continuing coverage of Nigeria's energy sector transformation and the NNPC's operational milestones.
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