Nigeria’s Offshore Revival: How Abuja is Drawing Eni, Shell, and TotalEnergies Back to the Deep

Beneath the Atlantic, off Nigeria’s coastline, sit reserves that international oil companies have circled for years without committing to. That hesitation appears to be easing. Eni, Shell and TotalEnergies are all now allegedly linked to renewed offshore investment activity, following new tax incentives from Abuja.

According to reports, the three majors are being drawn back by fresh measures under President Bola Tinubu, designed to make Nigeria’s deep offshore fields more attractive than rival ≠≠destinations competing for the same global capital.

The centrepiece is a new Deep Offshore Oil and Gas Projects Incentives framework, approved in August, meant to replace years of project-by-project haggling with clearer, investment-linked rules. The Presidency says it could unlock up to $50 billion in fresh offshore capital.

Shell’s Bonga South-West Aparo project shows what that framework can do in practice. NNPC and its OML 118 partners, including Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production, recently amended their production-sharing terms, moving the project closer to a final investment decision worth between $15 billion and $21 billion.

Then there is Eni’s story with its own peculiarities. In March, President Tinubu met the company’s chief executive, Claudio Descalzi, settling a dispute over OPL 245 that had run through courts for more than two decades. The block has since been converted into new development and exploration licences.

TotalEnergies, meanwhile, is chasing gas rather than crude, working with Nigerian independent producer Amni International on the Ima gas field, with a final investment decision expected once negotiations close.

Numbers this large invite scepticism. Nigeria has announced incentive frameworks before without seeing them convert into first oil, and NUPRC’s projection of a million extra barrels a day depends on approvals, financing, and construction falling into place across several years.

What has changed is that three companies with real global alternatives are once again spending time and money studying Nigerian blocks. Whether that attention becomes steel and production will depend on what Abuja does next.