The numbers behind the headline
According to NUPRC chief executive Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, 143 prequalified companies submitted roughly 200 bids for the 37 blocks that attracted offers, out of 50 originally on the market. Thirteen blocks received no bids and return to the bid basket for further technical work. Of the awards, sixteen sit in the Niger Delta onshore, eighteen in the shallow water, and one in deep offshore. The remaining eleven span frontier acreage: three in the Benin Basin, four in the Anambra Basin, four in the Chad Basin and four in the Benue Trough.
This matters because Nigeria has run licensing rounds before, and frontier basins were consistently treated as an afterthought while capital chased the Delta’s proven geology. Eyesan’s description of this round as the first to draw meaningful frontier interest is a regulator’s way of saying the underlying economics, or the underlying appetite for risk, have shifted.
Winners, and a notably indigenous list
The winning list, including Sonic Petroleum, Asharami, LexOil, Saratoga, Stardeep Petroleum, Dutchford E&P and Blackrock Holdings among others, is striking for its near-total absence of international supermajors. This reflects years of divestment by Shell, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies and ENI from onshore and shallow-water assets, citing security risk and community disputes, handing the baton to indigenous and mid-tier operators willing to absorb that risk for cheaper entry.
That handover shows in the bidding terms. NUPRC set the signature bonus at three million to seven million US dollars per block, down from a flat ten million dollars in 2024, a cut of thirty to seventy percent. The government still expects to raise between 111 million and 259 million dollars in bonuses, alongside a projected 300,000 barrels per day of additional production within three years. None of the awards is final: winners must pay their bonus, secure ministerial approval and meet post-award conditions within ninety days or forfeit the block, and NUPRC’s drill-or-drop policy means undeveloped acreage can later be withdrawn.
Why frontier basins, and why now
Nigeria’s frontier basins have been geologically tantalising and commercially frustrating for decades, with exploration in the Chad Basin and Benue Trough long complicated by limited success and, more recently, insecurity in the northeast. What appears to have changed is a mix of regulatory design and regional precedent. The lower bonus band opened the door to smaller Nigerian firms that could never compete for a ten-million-dollar entry fee. Just as significant is what has happened elsewhere on the continent: Namibia’s Orange Basin, essentially unexplored a decade ago, became one of the world’s most closely watched frontier plays after TotalEnergies, Shell and Galp confirmed a major new hydrocarbon province between 2022 and 2024. That success has done more than any single reform to convince exploration geologists that African frontier basins can deliver world-class discoveries.
The bigger picture, and a cautious read
The round sits inside a longer test of whether the Petroleum Industry Act, now four years old, is finally delivering the competitiveness against rivals like Angola, Ghana and Guyana that it promised. President Bola Tinubu has already approved a further round for 2026, suggesting Abuja intends competitive bid rounds to become routine rather than exceptional, at a moment when Nigeria continues to produce well below its OPEC quota.
Still, thirteen of fifty blocks drew no bids at all, and most winners are unfamiliar, thinly capitalised names rather than proven operators. Frontier basins carry higher exploratory failure rates than the Delta, and the real test will be whether these firms can raise capital and actually drill within NUPRC’s ninety-day and drill-or-drop deadlines. Even so, the willingness of dozens of companies to bid on acreage untested for fifty years says something about where African oil investment is heading, cautiously following the geological frontier, in Nigeria, in Namibia, and increasingly across the continent.
Written by:
*Dr Iqbal Survé
Past chairman of the BRICS Business Council and co-chairman of the BRICS Media Forum and the BRNN
*Sesona Mdlokovana
Associate at BRICS+ Consulting Group
Africa Specialist
**The Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Independent Media or IOL.
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