Jagir Baxi: Why Erha at 20 is Just the Beginning: My Vision for Nigeria’s Deepwater Future

On March 27, ExxonMobil marked a historic 20 years of uninterrupted operations at the Erha Field, a milestone that transcends mere production figures. Since delivering its first oil in 2006, Erha has yielded over 800 million barrels and fueled more than 850 cargo liftings, anchoring Nigeria’s status as a deepwater powerhouse. Yet, for ExxonMobil, the true measure of these two decades lies in the “capacity and capability” built: a sophisticated combination of human capital, career journeys, and world-class technology that has stood the test of a 20-year horizon. As the company celebrates this legacy, it is simultaneously sharpening the “tip of the spear” for Nigeria’s next energy frontier. With a strategy centred on capital efficiency, ExxonMobil is maturing a massive investment portfolio led by a $1 billion Usan infill campaign and the high-complexity $8 billion+ Owowo development. By leveraging existing FPSO infrastructure and new seismic data, the major aims to nearly double its current flowing capacity, potentially pushing production toward 250,000 barrels per day while unlocking critical gas-to-shore resources within the next five years. The Chairman and Managing Director of ExxonMobil Affiliates in Nigeria, Jagir Baxi, in this interview with Peter Uzoho, talks about the decades of uninterrupted oil production at the Erha field, operated by Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria Limited. Baxi shared insights on the company’s planned multibillion-dollar investments in deepwater projects in the Niger Delta, its non-participation in the ongoing Nigerian oil licensing round, and other issues. Excerpts:

ExxonMobil just celebrated 20 years of uninterrupted oil production at the Erha Field. Talk to us about the journey so far.
We achieved the amazing milestone of first oil at our Erha operations on March 27. And this journey of 20 years commenced several years before then, with the discovery and, thereafter, the development of the massive project, which delivered first oil on the 27th of March. From then till now, the Erha field has contributed an immense amount of value that can be measured in terms of production, be it 800 million barrels or more than 850 cargo liftings. But the harder value to measure, and I believe stakeholders feel it too, is the journey of people and careers and jobs, contribution to the economy and the combination of people and infrastructure and technology. When all of these come together, we use the term today: capacity and capability. It’s been proven in a 20-year horizon, with the promise of more to come. So we’re inspired. We want to celebrate this achievement and be inspired by what’s possible at Erha and in the industry.

You have a drilling schedule for later in the year, and you just said you will take a Final Investment Decision (FID) on some development projects. Is that FID on a new field inside Usan, Erha or on a mature field? Or is that an upside that was picked up by seismic? I learnt that the campaign is around 12 wells, from probably July this year or something. Can you clarify?

So what you’re referring to is an opportunity that we’ve been maturing over the last couple of years, anchored at Usan, which is our other operated asset, the newer, if you like, of the two that we operate and three that we have a partnership in. That opportunity is being unlocked by a combination of things. A couple of years ago, we invested in a campaign of new seismic acquisition around the entire OML 138 block where the Usan field lies, and as you would expect, after a little over a decade of production, it’s revealed where the field development plan can continue to recover resources that are within that block. So I think, to use your words, it is about adding drilling and wells to produce more of the resource that we call Usan. It’s not a satellite in the typical sense. It is part of the original Usan reservoir, but it is new infrastructure, brand new wells, new subsea connections, and it leverages the Usan FPSO capability and capacity that exists today. This makes it one of the more cost-effective developments in deep water, where we can utilise existing infrastructure to maximise value from those opportunities.  
Back to the comment I made about seismic: it became clear that there is a resource. It’s material, it’s valuable, it can be produced with relative speed, different from a brand-new greenfield FID. We do plan to declare the investment ready in a short while. We’ve been working with all the stakeholders here, NNPC Ltd as the concessionaire, our partners in OML 138, regulators like the NCDMB and NUPRC, to achieve all the relevant requirements that meet all stakeholder needs. And we are closing in on the point where all the important execution enablers will be clear and in place, and provide us the basis to declare that investment as ready to go. So we’re excited that it’s close to the point you made. It will provide new production from deepwater in the near term. Within months of the campaign starting, we’ll be able to produce from this investment. The investment runs through almost all of next year as a total campaign. It’s worth about one billion dollars in total, and we have already committed around 30 per cent of that in the early works, the early long-lead equipment and in the foundational contracts.

That’s about the time a typical large investment would reach FID readiness. So we’ll cross that gate or that milestone very soon. You mentioned something else I want to clarify: the well count. We have a strategy, and it’s needed in the deepwater, where when we mobilise a deep-water drilling rig, we give it the capacity to work as much as it can. That does a number of things; one, it puts the cost per well down because of the shared cost that can be applied over many opportunities. Secondly, it allows the drilling crew to become ever more efficient. Think about drilling a deepwater well like a Formula One pit stop, and the more practised a drilling crew gets at drilling deepwater wells on an existing rig with defined technology, the better they will get. This is proven out globally in the industry and in our own experience. So we want Usan to be the start, but what we seek to do is to string together a campaign that can keep that deepwater drilling asset active across as many opportunities as we can. Usan represents the start.

We’re trying to mature similarly at Erha. Very similar approach.  We have also shot seismic at Erha. We will find opportunities that will make sense, and with the Erha partners and the other stakeholders I mentioned, we want to mature them. And so we hope we can keep a drilling rig active beyond Usan because we will need it, the partners definitely, but the industry will benefit from continuity of deep water drilling.

When you see these rig schedules, operators tend to put the numbers, but some of this might not have been found out. You mentioned now that you hope the campaign extends to Erha, but when you look at that rig schedule, you actually see Erha already. Can you throw more light?

Yes, we’re de-risking that. So, rig schedules are not necessarily entirely actionable. It’s not deterministic, but we have a strategy built on improving the clarity of each piece after Usan to keep a rig schedule active over multiple years. It’s the nature of this business. We look forward two years to try and create the ability to pre-invest through long lead items, which take more than a year to deliver in the deep water, sometimes two years.

To contemplate this future, if we’re thinking about Erha drilling after Usan, the partner group has to make some decisions at least a year, if not a little longer before, to say, I’m willing to take a step of investment so that I can keep that window of opportunity available and build confidence towards it. We speak today, and I speak of Usan with high confidence of its occurrence, but that journey of de-risking started two years ago. It’s the nature of deep-water developments; that is the kind of lead time that’s needed to deploy capital and technology well before the day when we see what is often visible, the FID or announcements, the journey has started many years before, sometimes at least two years ahead.

The $1 billion is about Usan, not Erha, right?
Yeah, that’s the  commitment of the Usan partners that I’m referring to.

So, do you have any plans for the Owowo field development?

Yes. So, Owowo, as you’re probably aware, represents one of the larger discoveries that is up for development. We describe Owowo in our deepwater portfolio now as the tip of our spear of development. Allow me to paint a picture using some of the FIDs and other programmes you’re aware of. So Usan represents an opportunity to invest in a place where we know the geology, and we have infrastructure. Our partner and our share in Bonga North is similar, a known resource with an existing investment. Owowo represents at least one order of more complexity. It’s in a separate OML. Our objective is to maximise Owowo through the Usan asset, which is very adjacent, but it is a step-out technology. It’s a long subsea tieback. In terms of well counts, it will be at least twice as big as Bonga North, if not more, and it has the ability to have Usan now be a true hub development beyond its own OML. So we see that as the tip of the spear because we understand the geology the most.

In terms of step-out, the engineering is more. We can see the path from today’s traditional tiebacks to a step-out tieback, not without its challenges, but still, we can see a path there. We’re very motivated to keep the Usan FPSO fully utilised. Again, it’s because that will provide the most capital-efficient outcome for the investors and for the government. So it’s the tip of the spear. Owowo is the one that we are also maturing rapidly behind Usan infill as the lead investment.

So, Owowo is not a new FPSO?

The lead concept is a tie-in because it falls within the technical boundary for a tieback. It’s a step-out, but it’s within a global experience envelope. Usan FPSO is available. It has capacity. It is largely the kind of FPSO that Owowo needs to develop. Conceptually, a new FPSO at Owowo will entail higher capital expenditure. More CAPEX means the investor group will seek to recover that capital through Owowo production. If that does happen, it means fewer barrels that can then contribute to the betterment of Nigerians, either through revenue, taxes, or profit sharing with the government, right? So when we look at Owowo, we also use the phrase ‘competitive deepwater development’. Competitive here means achieving a capital basis that is the most optimal for Owowo, which is a tieback, because more of the resource is available to create value share for more stakeholders.

An investment that requires higher CAPEX, for whatever reason that may be, in a production sharing contract environment, the investors will recover that because the capital does get recovered. That’s not necessarily good, because lower CAPEX means more production barrels are available to share. Investors will share some of that, but so will the resource owner. So, I don’t want to be lazy about our capital investments. I’m painting this picture for dramatic effect. It has to be the right capital-efficient development for Owowo. Usan provides that opportunity. And the partners in Owowo are the same partners in Usan. So there is a natural environment to capitalise on what’s available at Usan.

If it is this easy, if it’s near Usan enough to take advantage of the Usan infrastructure, why is it taking so long to take FID on Owowo?
I think you’re asking about timing. I don’t want to leave you with the impression that it’s easy. It is not easy. It is at the very edge of global experience for deepwater development. So it is challenging in that sense. And it’s challenging to go from the idea of Owowo to Usan and translate it into an engineered solution we can bank on. ‘We’ meaning, all of us: the investor group, the government, the stakeholders, can bank on what is hopefully more than two decades. So, the journey of Owowo is similar. We work behind the scenes until we get to the point of FID as the visible announcement. Step back several years from that, at least two years, if not more. We have been on the journey to utilise the data of Owowo exploration and appraisal with reprocessing of that data and seismic with the most modern capability that exists in the industry today. We did that through 2021 and 2022.

It underpinned a field development plan update we submitted to NUPRC, which they approved. And from there, we have been working and inspired by this administration’s enabling announcements through 2024. I’m referring specifically to Presidential Executive Directives 40, 41, and 42. They were the incentives for national content and contracting. To that end, the intent and mission of those directives by His Excellency the President, and the journey since the FDP for Owowo was approved, have been to translate each intent into project-specific outcomes. You’ve heard me say this before, I believe the project-specific enablers required to be defined from those directives. For example, a national content directive translates into an Owowo-specific national content strategy. The contracting and efficient cycle time of contracting translates to an Owowo contracting strategy. And the incentive structure translates to an Owowo incentive analysis. That’s been the work since our divestment concluded.

So, that’s 15 or 16 months. That’s the kind of time horizon it’s taken, 15 or 16 months since our divestment. Because we have been public about the need for the shallow-water and deep-water separation, we could give our best attention to the deep water. And we have. But we’re in that window of at least two years of work to mature what will be billions of dollars. You should think about Owowo at the $7 to $8 billion-plus range. So, I come back to Usan at $1 billion. Bonga North is at $5 billion. We’re now in the eight-plus range as a measure of complexity and step-up. So, the sense of urgency around the timing of the announcement, I share with you and the stakeholders.

But to make an announcement we can all stand behind, the maturity of all the thinking that has to occur is still in flight. And what I hope we’ll be able to be more open about with stakeholders, like you and others, is when we can point to the formative announcements or formative agreements, like long-lead procurement, like establishing shore base capability to support that. These will be the visible early signals before FID, just like we did with the Usan field. So, there’s a lot that occurs today that is within the stakeholder groups, enabling the presidential inspiration. Each of those will reach a milestone that will underpin more visible commitments.

That’s the journey we’re on. So, when we make an FID announcement, we do it with the partners clearly aligned with us, the stakeholders clearly aligned. It’s a signal to go. We’re not interested in making an announcement that looks like we want to go. That’s not the ExxonMobil way. We want certainty. We’ll work for certainty, and we’ll commit to what we say we will do as operator and move to it. That’s the reputation we want to continue to live by. It’s the clarity of our intent, and then we will do what we say.

Are you involved in the ongoing licensing round?

No, we are not. We’ve chosen not to. We assessed last year’s licensing round and this one. The essential reason for that is that we view participating in the licensing round we’ll do one of two things. One, we need to be clear that we want to make that commitment, but I have three large commitments we’ve talked about. I’d prefer to make sure they mature. It’s just a capital choice at this point. Then, the other is that our very best capability that we can bring to Nigeria from our global organisation is to the development of deep-water resources that we can see. So we have chosen to keep our attention on our discoveries that are available and need development. Last year and this year, we assessed the licensing round opportunities, and we’ll continue to do that. There may be a future in which we are interested in the possible areas NUPRC may make available, and if so, we’ll participate. But our absence is not a signal to the value of that process. I want to be sure that you know that. It’s not.

Our absence is more about making rational choices of where to commit our resources at this time.
Certainly, with the present asset that you’re discussing. There’s only one deep water block in this cycle. There was more last cycle, and some of the other IOCs participated, as you know. And it’s really about this. We want to bring our best resources and our focus to those three that we know can go. If we don’t put our attention into maturing those, because we went and did a licensing round, it will end up at the back end of the spear, using that analogy. And then the nature of licensing, and I fully support the government on this, if you grab a licence, you win it, fair and square, to move on it so that the block is not sitting idle. It is not fair for us to go participate, do that, and then turn my attention to the ones I already have. We just don’t want to play in that way.

You mentioned that Owowo is about two or three times the size of Bonga. What’s the resource base like?
Yes, I know. Maybe just one thing. I understand that there have been so many efforts to ensure that maybe the government provide the right incentive that will make Esso make the right investment. I’ll connect all of these together. So, to help characterise Owowo to the more simpler type. Owowo, in a full development case, would be 20 to 40 wells. The Erha tie-back and the Bonga tie-back are in the 10 to 15 wells range. Those tie-backs are single kilometres away. Owowo is 30 plus kilometres away. That’s why I use the term, it’s the edge of industry capability.

Resource size: you can characterise Owowo as at least 50 per cent or more larger than either the Erha North tieback or the Bonga North tieback to Bonga. It’s a truly big field. But its geography is spread more than Erha or Bonga today are. So, these are some of the characteristics of complexity that I would share as ways that we can describe and help you understand the progression of the investments to date, the tiebacks that are occurring. To the question you raised about incentives. So, I mentioned before that, among the directives issued in 2024, one was the incentive structure. And it has enabled Owowo to be more globally competitive. But I want to come back to the fact that ExxonMobil is not looking for handouts. We are not. What we want is to be able to bring our best, which is highly competitive cost and schedule, because that will create more value from the resource for more stakeholders, not just for the investor group. The incentives that the president has codified and is continuing to support bring another level of improved ability to invest. It takes all three of those, and I’m not interested in taking advantage of just one.

I want to bring our best as an investor by capitalising on contracting and national content, along with incentives. All three partners together to unlock. So, to the question of what we are doing to mature Owowo, I come back to the project-specific definition of all three of those. And so, we are working on the project-specific definition of incentives with the stakeholders who are involved in that space. Again, I want all three to be mature. I don’t want to rely on a handout from the government. I want to bring our best to capital, to project delivery, to cost efficiency. Then we will all win. All stakeholders will win in that development.

When you use the phrase ‘tip of the spear’ to describe Owowo, what does that mean?

Yeah, we use this phrase for Owowo because it is a true greenfield development, as opposed to tie-backs. And we use the concept of the tip of the spear because there are more developments following it. And I’ll use the names of these developments, so you’re aware. Our next opportunity is Bosi. And then we are heavily invested and supportive of our partner development in Bonga South-west, which has recently been well talked about in the media, because we have a 20 per cent share in Bonga, and so that’s of interest to us. So, in a sequence of the spear piercing the next horizon of deepwater development, we see Owowo as the one we can bring to maturity, we see Bosi as the second one that we can bring, and we want to support the success of Bonga South-west.

So, Bosi is a higher priority for you than Bonga South-west?

No, it’s better to look at it in terms of technical maturity. I would describe to you in terms of readiness: technical maturity and readiness. Owowo and Bonga Southwest are more similar in readiness terms. Bosi is less ready in terms of its overall technical maturity. Unlike Bonga and Owowo, Bosi is a much more oil-and-gas development, not a primarily oil development. What does that mean? So it means that the nature of the investment infrastructure is fundamentally different and more involved. Today, Erha doesn’t have and doesn’t need a pathway for gas handling, but Bosi will, from day one. Owowo’s scope will bring a gas outlet for Owowo and Usan. And  so part of Owowo’s delivery is a gas pipeline. If we’re successful with FID, it will be gas-to-shore. But Bosi, in its complexity, is from where Owowo is to another step forward. It is aerially bigger than Owowo, multiple times bigger, in terms of the span of that reservoir resource.
In geology, there are more geological areas for Bosi than for Owowo. And its proximity to Erha is one measure. It has more reservoirs where the oil and gas are accumulated. But in terms of a net basis, Bosi is bigger than Owowo. But it has more gas than it has oil.

Is that why Bosi has been on the back burner for 25 years or  thereabout? It has struggled in a number of areas. The gas development value chain is one of those.
Yes, but we can see a path that’s a bit clearer today. We can see that the incentive structure accounts for gas explicitly today. That hasn’t been the case before. The nature of Owowo and Bosi requires top-tier global contracting partners. Those partners are more interested in returning and investing in Nigeria today. ExxonMobil will not be able to make Bosi a reality without that added capacity. And then the ability to utilise the contracting and national content directives today is more enabling than it’s been historically. So we can see a clearer path for Bosi. The technical maturity is not as ready as Bongo Southwest or Owowo. So, it will naturally come behind. But it needs more work on the gas side than the other two have needed so far. But there’s an enabling environment, a collaboration space with stakeholders that gives me confidence that it can be matured. But I don’t want to leave you with any guarantees. Not just guarantees, but there’s a journey of development for Bosi that is going to take the kind of time horizon we’ve talked about here.

Which means Bosi won’t happen in the next seven or eight years?

We are motivated to make it happen sooner than that. But in terms of major announcements, there is a journey still to go. The same journey we’ve talked about on the others, we still have to walk that journey together and with our partners. So, your question started with the tip of the spear. This is what I would like you to take away: there are three large, important developments that we are part of and leading. We want to create the space and certainty that contracting can lift all three. National content can lift all three. The incentive structures can lift all three. Bosi has a specific need, which is, how do we maximally develop the gas? At a scale that has not been done in deep water yet in Nigeria.

Let’s look at what’s happening in the global oil market due to  the Middle East crisis. How is that shaping your business in Nigeria?
To be clear, I won’t, and I don’t want to comment on prices. That’s not our role, not my role. What I would like to do is draw a connection between the unfortunate events that are occurring and the ripple effects that are occurring. So, I’d say the first other concern for me is that our producing assets produce everything that it can today. Because every barrel is valuable to the country because of the price, the change in price. But every barrel is valuable to the global community because of the ability to minimise and offset an energy gap somewhere. I think, by public record, nearly 20 per cent of global oil capacity has been curtailed in the Middle East. So, every barrel we produce at Erha and Usan, that our partner produces at Bonga, and that we all produce across the Nigerian oil and gas sector, has this double opportunity.

Financial flow for the country today, but perhaps most importantly, the ability to offset an energy deficit somewhere. What does that energy deficit look like in another location? We feel it here in Nigeria. It’s a lack of electricity. It’s a lack of refined products for transportation. It’s a lack of feedstock for plastics, fertilisers, and so on. So, the barrel in Nigeria has great value. So, as the leader of this organisation, I’m strongly incentivised to think about everything we can do to produce safely and responsibly, but, at this time especially, to play a global role as a global partner. I think the next evolution is really about what we can do to accelerate the next tranche of development. We’ve talked about those today. Some of those are in a month’s horizon, and they can make a difference. Some of those are in a year’s horizon. It may make a difference.

Then, the third concern for me is really about business continuity. Being a global industry, we are global in the products we offer and where they go, but we’re also global in our supply chain support. So, I’m concerned about supply chain elements that either produce from the Middle East that are interrupted or flow through the Middle East in terms of shipping routes, transport routes. So, these are the three areas where this global uncertainty scenario we’re facing today affects our business. Broadly speaking, I think it affects the Nigerian oil and gas industry. It’ll take a kind of collaboration across the leaders of this industry to be prepared to navigate all three. But today, the next few months, and then the ripple effects that may affect supply chains, which we probably haven’t seen the full effect of yet. It’s a very difficult environment now. It is.

What’s the company’s five-year outlook as we speak? Both Usan and Erha are roughly producing around 105,000 barrels per day now. With Usan infill, that will roughly go to 130,000. Have you seen a possibility of 250,000 in the next five years? If indeed Owowo takes FID this year?

Allow me to do this in reverse, in building my answer up. Because the five-year horizon is built on some of what you’re asking in terms of production. So, I’ll definitely answer both. But I’d like to start by just helping you see the numbers. So you’re absolutely right. Esso’s operations today accumulate a little over 100,000 barrels per day. We also look at and want to support higher volumes, because that’s important to us as a shareholder. But it’s important for the country, too. We expect Usan’s infill programme to unlock somewhere up to 40,000 barrels. So that is almost a doubling of the flowing capacity of Usan.

For the Erha infill programme, we estimate around 20,000 barrels. Based on what we can see today, we hope to grow that. Then, Owowo, our view is that it can produce over 100,000 barrels at peak. So, to your question about whether we can see a future of 250,000 or 200,000 barrels, yes, it is definitely a possibility as we put these investment pieces together. We are motivated to try and do more than that, actually. I mentioned that the Owowo project comes with the expectation of a gas pipeline that can unlock gas from Owowo and Usan to shore. So, 250,000 barrels of liquids, we’d like to be able to get to 100 million cubic feet of gas per day, also, from Owowo, underpinned by Owowo, especially. The horizon has that kind of possibility. There is gas there. It is higher. It has more gas compared to Usan or Erha. It is valuable that we try to monetise it together with doing the oil development. We are incentivised with a partner group to bring gas from the hub of Owowo and Usan to shore. That’s the development path that gets us to 200-plus and a valuable amount of gas in a five-year horizon.

It is something that we are motivated to do. But beyond that, we want to mature Bosi in this five-year horizon. I cannot tell you today where that notable FID might occur, but we are investing to mature it as fast as we can. We want to provide all the support we can to the Bonga partners to bring Bonga Southwest to reality. Then, we have a desire to make sure that we have improved and solidified our understanding of all the resource space in our operating blocks, especially around Owowo. As we develop Owowo, what I’m hoping that we’ll do is be able to prove out deeper horizons, adjacent horizons, and just know that we have got the very best picture. All this is in the five-year horizon that we have in mind. Our plan to anchor firmly in Nigeria as Esso Nigeria in the deep water flows through multiple investments and improving our ability to see more of what is possible in the deep water, beyond the three that we can see today.

Can you provide specific dates for when the FIDs for the Usan, Bonga Southwest, and Owowo projects will be signed? Also, the narrative out there was that ExxonMobil was the stumbling block in getting FID for Bonga Southwest.
I just can’t give you the specifics on FID timelines today. I’m being very honest with you. But I would like to talk a little bit about Bonga Southwest because I appreciate the narrative that exists. Allow me to at least express our view on Bonga South-west. So, there’s definitely a way to describe it: we are not blocking the FID on Bonga Southwest. That’s not our posture on Bonga. Our posture on Bonga Southwest has been to help and support the operator and the partners to do the necessary work to improve its readiness for FID. Part of what’s been needed is an enabling fiscal structure that now exists. But also part of what’s been needed is the maturity of the resource understanding and the maturity of the project-specific application of national content and contracting strategy. So, if the perception is blocking, I would offer to you that we have tried to express first of all, what can make Bonga Southwest compete in our capital portfolio. That’s one partner’s view.

But in doing that, it also makes the project more capital-competitive. So that when we do invest, we are not simply getting barrels and recovering extra CAPEX that would otherwise be shared across shareholders. Often, that important factor is lost in the top-line narrative that somehow partners blocked it. It’s more than that. It’s an expression of what can make that investment capital competitive. When it is capital-competitive, it’s also unlocking the best total value for all shareholders. Otherwise, the CAPEX will be high. The schedule will be long. Underlying this is an expression that we should do the work, and we should ask our stakeholders to do the work with us to make as big an investment as Bonga Southwest competitive at a global scale. In Nigeria, it may not be the most competitive, but that’s okay. But it needs to be competitive, the barrels will be produced, the dollars will come, and it will recover for the investors.

This is what’s underlying the stance of saying, ‘Hey, it’s not ready’. We’re expressing a view that more needs to be done to make it ready. And this administration, His Excellency the President honourable ministers and other stakeholders have played their part in putting together the pieces, including the most recent announcement of support for Bonga Southwest. Those are the pieces. That’s why we want to support it. We can support it. Is there more to do? Yes, because the full technical definition to achieve an FID with certainty is the journey we’re on. I can’t give you clarity on FID timing. I can tell you we are fully committed to supporting because the conditions are right today. If any one of these conditions was found to be a challenge, I owe it to my principals, I owe it to the operator, and I owe it to the government stakeholders to say what that might be. The environment today allows for honest discussion like that to be tabled, and we can move forward together from that. So that’s the way I would describe it today; it is not blocking for blocking’s sake. It’s an expression of improving the project, and in doing that for the investors, we will do that for everyone.

What is your outlook for the Nigerian oil industry for 2026 vis-à-vis the government’s target of ramping up oil production to around two million barrels per day in the short term and three million barrels by 2030? So how do you see the industry realising these targets?

The best way that I would like to answer this with you is that every day that this industry achieves 24 hours of safe, reliable production is the day when natural decline is against us. For these numbers that exist today, let’s even take the basis of the 2026 fiscal budget benchmark of 1.8 million barrels. Because that’s the basis that the government is looking to create the cash flow for this country. But for every day that we are producing barrels today at 1.5 million, 1.6 million or 1.7 million barrels, whatever it may be, to get to 1.8 million, I have to offset a day’s worth of decline and add capacity. To get to two million, I have to offset multiple days of decline, add capacity, and get to three million. It just continues. So what does that mean? The outlook for achieving that kind of outcome translates into the speed of action on new capacity and the very best reliable production on existing capacity. Those two have to work hand in hand. So I think we are all talking today a lot about FIDs. But do you recognise FIDs about new capacity? A lot of value in support of this vision is in existing capacity, protecting, supporting, and optimising existing capacity.

If that drops off, if we lost the ability to produce Erha and Usan today, hypothetical, 100,000 barrels, that’s all of Owowo. I would say to your question about outlook, there’s a need to produce everything we can today. That’s even the global climate we talked about. And then make sure that we are all incentivised for clarity with speed. Because then those capacities will come on and be able to truly lift from today to two to three million barrels. Otherwise, what will happen is that we’re adding capacity on an ever-declining basis. we won’t see the benefit of actual higher production. We’ll simply be offsetting today’s production. To me, speed is really, really important. Again, I want to recognise this presidency. They have created momentum for speed. as stakeholders, we’ve got to play all of our parts to realise that outcome. But we’ve got to protect today with equal veracity as the chase for FIDs. Otherwise, we’ll miss the opportunity to actually lift that outlook.