Nigeria

Nigeria in one paragraph

Nigeria is one of the largest oil producers in OPEC, but the number that matters most for anyone reading its data is not the size of the resource. It is the distance between the oil the wells can technically deliver and the oil that actually gets metered at the export terminals. The Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) puts that delivery rate at about two thirds of technical capacity in 2024. Output recovered in 2025 and into 2026, and from May 2026 crude production ran at or slightly above Nigeria's OPEC+ reference level. This page builds the picture from the NUPRC's monthly production tables and its 2024 annual report, with U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts as a cross-check. All figures were checked in October 2026.

The production record, from the regulator's own tables

The NUPRC publishes a two-page production table for each year on its reports page, listing daily average output by terminal and by stream, split into crude oil, blended condensate and unblended condensate. The annual figures below are PetroEyes sums of the regulator's monthly volumes, divided by the days in each year.

Year	Crude oil + condensate (b/d)	Crude oil only (b/d)	Total volume (barrels)	Source
2024	about 1,549,000	about 1,340,000	566.8 million	NUPRC 2024 production data
2025	about 1,643,000	about 1,453,000	599.6 million	NUPRC 2025 production data
2026, Jan to Sep	about 1,648,000	about 1,475,000	provisional	NUPRC 2026 production data

The monthly path in 2026 shows how uneven a year can be. Total liquids fell from 1,627,460 b/d in January to 1,483,950 b/d in February, then climbed to a peak of 1,735,400 b/d in June. September came in at 1,717,030 b/d, which the NUPRC describes as 1.53 million b/d of crude and 0.19 million b/d of condensate (NUPRC 2026 table, remarks on September production, checked October 2026).

Month (2026)	Total, thousand b/d	Crude oil, thousand b/d
January	1,627.46	1,459.24
February	1,483.95	1,313.69
March	1,546.09	1,382.84
April	1,663.41	1,488.54
May	1,700.80	1,530.35
June	1,735.40	1,555.22
July	1,670.89	1,505.25
August	1,677.77	1,500.19
September	1,717.03	1,529.79

What the February dip was made of

Stream-level rows explain most of the February drop. The deepwater Bonga stream produced 119,400 b/d in January 2026, just 2,020 b/d in February, and 91,990 b/d in March before returning to about 100,000 b/d. Several other streams fell at the same time. A single offshore facility going offline can move the national figure by more than 100,000 b/d in a month, which is why a monthly drop in Nigerian output should be checked at stream level before it is read as a trend.

Capacity versus delivery: the technical allowable rate

The NUPRC sets a technical allowable rate (TAR) for every producing well after the twice-yearly maximum efficiency rate test, and it describes the TAR as "the optimised production capacity of all wells in-country" (NUPRC 2024 Annual Report, section 1.2.2, checked October 2026). For the first half of 2024 the approved TAR came to 1,961,426 b/d of oil plus 374,066 b/d of condensate, about 2.34 million b/d in total. The same report states that "production performance against TAR in 2024 was about 67%".

That ratio is the most useful single number for understanding Nigeria. It says the gap is not mainly in the reservoirs. It sits above ground: in pipelines, terminals, security, field outages and funding for joint-venture work programmes.

Worked example: what closing part of the gap would mean

Take the regulator's 2024 delivered average from its annual report, 1,580,369 b/d of oil and condensate, and its first-half TAR of roughly 2.34 million b/d.

• Delivered as a share of TAR: 1.58 / 2.34 = about 67 percent, matching the regulator's statement.
• Raising delivery to 75 percent of the same TAR would mean about 1.75 million b/d, an extra 170,000 b/d.
• Raising it to 85 percent would mean about 1.99 million b/d.

This is arithmetic on stated inputs, not a forecast. TAR itself changes every half year as wells are retested, and the 2H2024 TAR was lower than the first half.

Two NUPRC numbers for the same year

The NUPRC publishes two sets of 2024 production figures, and they do not match. The annual report gives total 2024 production of 578,521,740 barrels, or 1,580,369 b/d. The monthly production tables for the same year sum to 566,794,493 barrels, or about 1,549,000 b/d. The difference is about 11.7 million barrels, or 2.1 percent.

The annual report itself explains why caution is needed: it notes that its figures "are unreconciled volumes and should not be reported as export volumes". Readers comparing Nigeria across sources should state which NUPRC series they are using. On this page, annual averages come from the monthly tables unless the annual report is named.

Where the barrels come from

Production by contract type

The 2024 annual report splits output by the type of arrangement under which it was produced:

Contract type	Share of 2024 production
Joint ventures (with NNPC)	48%
Production sharing contracts	35%
Sole risk	13%
Marginal fields	4%

Production sharing contracts are mainly the deepwater fields operated by international companies. Joint ventures cover much of the older onshore and shallow-water acreage. Marginal fields and sole risk operations are where Nigerian independent companies have grown their share.

The deepwater streams and their decline

Deepwater fields report as single-stream rows in the NUPRC tables, which makes them easy to follow. The deepwater Egina field averaged about 62,600 b/d over 2025, starting the year near 69,500 b/d in January and ending near 54,500 b/d in December. By September 2026 it was producing 44,640 b/d, about 36 percent below January 2025. Bonga averaged about 121,000 b/d in 2025. Usan, another deepwater stream, fell from about 32,600 b/d in January 2025 to 28,240 b/d in September 2026. The previous version of this page listed Egina at about 200,000 b/d; the regulator's data show that is not its current output, and the figure has been removed.

The pattern matters for the national total. Deepwater fields were built to be insulated from onshore pipeline problems, but they deplete. Holding Nigerian output flat requires either new deepwater projects or a recovery in onshore volumes that have been held back by security and infrastructure.

Drilling activity: the NUPRC rig count

The regulator also publishes a monthly rig disposition report. Unlike the US weekly count explained in Baker Hughes rig count explained, it lists active, standby, stacked and moving rigs separately (NUPRC 2025 rig disposition statistics, checked October 2026).

Month (2025)	Active rigs	Standby	Total rigs counted
January	36	7	53
April	38	7	62
June	43	6	65
July	43	5	67
September	40	8	69
October	40	10	71

The table shows zeros for November and December 2025, which reads as data not yet entered rather than a collapse to no rigs, so those months are left out here. The direction through October is up: active rigs peaked at 43 in June and July, seven more than in January, and the total counted rose by 18. Rig activity tends to lead production by several months, which fits the higher output in mid-2026.

Terminals and export permits

Nigerian crude leaves through a network of onshore terminals and offshore floating storage units. The NUPRC 2024 annual report states that 32 crude oil and gas terminals were operational during 2024, that it processed 587 export permit applications for crude oil, condensate and gas in the year, and that four new terminal establishment orders were initiated, among them the Utapate floating storage terminal and the Otakikpo onshore terminal. The growth in small terminals matters because it gives fields an outlet that does not depend on the long onshore trunklines most exposed to theft and sabotage.

Natural gas: larger than the oil

Nigeria holds more gas than oil on an energy basis. The NUPRC's reserve table as of January 1, 2024:

Resource	Volume
Crude oil	31.56 billion barrels
Condensate	5.94 billion barrels
Oil and condensate total	37.50 billion barrels
Associated gas	106.67 trillion cubic feet
Non-associated gas	102.59 trillion cubic feet
Gas total	209.26 trillion cubic feet

Source: NUPRC 2024 Annual Report, table 1.1, checked October 2026.

In 2024 the country produced 2.511 trillion cubic feet of gas, an average of 6.86 billion cubic feet per day, of which 57.2 percent was associated gas produced alongside oil. The regulator reports that 92.26 percent was utilised, 7.64 percent was flared and 0.10 percent was shrinkage.

Insight: the reserves-to-production arithmetic

Dividing reserves by output gives a rough life for each resource at current rates. These are simple ratios, not depletion forecasts, because reserves are revised every year.

• Oil and condensate: 37.50 billion barrels / 578.5 million barrels produced in 2024 = about 65 years.
• Gas: 209.26 trillion cubic feet / 2.511 trillion cubic feet produced in 2024 = about 83 years.

The gas ratio is longer, and roughly half of the gas reserve is associated gas whose output is tied to oil production. For the method and its limits, see the reserves and depletion analysis in the news archive and the barrel of oil explainer for the unit conversions.

The OPEC+ quota and Nigeria's compliance

Nigeria is an OPEC member and participates in the OPEC+ arrangements. The NUPRC prints a compliance line in the remarks of each monthly table, measuring crude oil alone against a reference of 1.5 million b/d:

Period	NUPRC compliance remark
December 2024	crude at 98.97% of the OPEC quota
December 2025	crude at 95% of the OPEC quota
September 2026	crude at 102% of the OPEC quota

In the monthly 2026 table, crude output was at or above 1.5 million b/d in May (1,530,350 b/d), June (1,555,220 b/d), July, August and September, after running below it from January to April.

On PetroEyes' annual sums, crude averaged about 89 percent of 1.5 million b/d in 2024, about 97 percent in 2025 and about 98 percent across January to September 2026. Through 2024 and 2025 Nigeria was a producer that could not reach its reference level, the opposite problem to members that overproduce. The 2026 table is the first in this series where crude output held at or above the reference for several months in a row. How OPEC itself counts Nigerian output, using secondary sources rather than the NUPRC figure, is explained in how to read the OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report, and the quota system is covered in OPEC+ explained.

Cross-check against the EIA

The EIA's October 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook, Table 3c puts Nigeria's total petroleum liquids at 1.67 million b/d for 2025, and 1.60, 1.72 and 1.71 million b/d in the first three quarters of 2026. The EIA series includes natural gas plant liquids and other liquids that the NUPRC table does not, so it should run slightly above the regulator's crude-plus-condensate figure, and it does. When the two sources move in opposite directions, the difference is worth checking.

Losses, spills and the security problem

The 2024 annual report records 732 oil spill incidents during the year and states that 59.01 percent were the result of sabotage. Spills from sabotage and theft affect production directly: when a trunkline is shut to stop leaks, every field feeding that line is shut in with it, which is one mechanism behind the TAR gap.

Previous versions of this page quoted a figure of about 400,000 b/d lost to theft in 2022 and 2023. That number could not be traced to a primary source in this review and has been removed. The regulator's spill count and its TAR performance ratio are the documented measures used here.

Refining: the Dangote plant changes the domestic balance

Nigeria has long exported crude while importing refined fuel. The Dangote Petroleum Refinery in the Lekki Free Trade Zone, Lagos, now states a "current CDU capacity" of 700,000 b/d and an expansion target of 1.4 million b/d, with products made to Euro V standard and a polypropylene capacity of 830,000 tonnes a year (Dangote Petroleum Refinery, checked October 2026). Earlier descriptions of the plant, including the one previously on this page, used 650,000 b/d.

Worked example: how much of Nigeria's crude one refinery could take

• Crude oil production, September 2026 (NUPRC): 1,529,790 b/d.
• Dangote crude distillation capacity (company statement): 700,000 b/d.
• If the refinery ran at full capacity on domestic crude only, it would absorb 700,000 / 1,529,790 = about 46 percent of Nigeria's crude output.

In practice the refinery also buys imported crude, including US grades, and Nigerian crude is committed under existing export contracts, so the real share is lower. The regulator's annual report notes that the Commission "facilitated domestic crude supply to Dangote refinery and other refiners" and invited refiners to its monthly production curtailment meetings. The direction is clear, though: a refinery of this size can turn Nigeria from a large gasoline importer into a product exporter, which changes the trade figures readers see in US oil imports by country and in European product markets.

The fiscal picture in naira

The NUPRC collects royalties and several other upstream charges. Its 2024 revenue table reports total collections of about N12.25 trillion against a budget of about N6.93 trillion. Royalties on oil and gas, including NNPC receivables, account for about N11.08 trillion, roughly 90 percent of the total. Gas flare penalties brought in about N391.3 billion, nearly triple the budgeted amount. Those numbers are in naira, and exchange-rate movements change their dollar value, so a rise in naira collections is not the same as a rise in dollar revenue.

The legal framework: the Petroleum Industry Act

The Petroleum Industry Act of 2021 rebuilt the regulatory structure. The NUPRC's annual report is itself a requirement of the Act (sections 24(9) and (10)), and the Commission regulates upstream activity under it. The Act's fiscal terms, host community provisions and the commercialisation of the national oil company are beyond what this page can verify figure by figure, so they are not quantified here.

Misreadings to avoid

• Mixing crude and crude-plus-condensate. OPEC compliance is measured on crude oil only. A headline of "1.7 million b/d" usually includes condensate.
• Comparing NUPRC annual and monthly figures. As shown above, they can differ by about 2 percent for the same year.
• Reading a one-month drop as a trend. Single stream outages, such as Bonga in February 2026, can explain most of a monthly move.
• Treating capacity as production. The TAR, and any company nameplate figure, measures what wells or plants could do, not what they did.
• Comparing naira totals across years without adjusting for the exchange rate.

Frequently asked questions

How much oil does Nigeria produce per day?

About 1.64 million barrels per day of crude oil and condensate in 2025, and about 1.65 million b/d across January to September 2026, based on NUPRC monthly tables. Crude oil alone was about 1.45 million b/d in 2025 and 1.53 million b/d in September 2026.

Is Nigeria meeting its OPEC quota?

For most of 2024 and 2025 it produced below its 1.5 million b/d crude reference level. From May to September 2026 crude output was at or above that level, and the NUPRC reported September at 102 percent.

Why does Nigeria produce below its capacity?

The regulator's 2024 annual report puts production at about 67 percent of the technical allowable rate. The documented causes include pipeline sabotage and spills (59 percent of 732 spills in 2024 were attributed to sabotage), facility outages and field decline in deepwater streams.

How big are Nigeria's oil and gas reserves?

37.50 billion barrels of oil and condensate and 209.26 trillion cubic feet of gas as of January 1, 2024, according to the NUPRC.

How large is the Dangote refinery?

The company states a current crude distillation capacity of 700,000 b/d and a planned expansion to 1.4 million b/d.

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References

1. Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission. 2024 Oil Production Data, 2025 Oil Production Data and 2026 Oil Production Data, January to September. Checked October 2026.
2. Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission. 2024 Annual Financial and Operational Performance Report. Checked October 2026.
3. U.S. Energy Information Administration. Short-Term Energy Outlook, October 2026, Table 3c. Checked October 2026.
4. Dangote Petroleum Refinery. Company website. Checked October 2026.