The Nigerian government had discovered one billion barrels of crude oil in the North-East part of the country
Nigeria, the largest producer of oil in Africa and the continent's economic giant, relies on oil for its foreign exchange earnings, with oil contributing around 90 per cent of its foreign exchange proceeds.
However, production had been from the Southern part of the country, most especially the Niger Delta region, leading to complaints that the oil from the south is used to develop the North.
The details of the new discovery were disclosed on 12 February 2020 by Dr Timipre Sylva, Nigeria’s Nigeria’s minister of state for petroleum resources, at the closing ceremony of the International Petroleum Summit in Abuja.
The Federal capital is still sketchy, according to Slyva.
“The figure is not totally out yet but from the evaluation results we getting, the reserve that has been discovered is about a billion barrels. Those are the kinds of figures we are seeing and we are beginning to understand the geological structure of the region. If there is a lot of exploration, we believe that a lot of oil still remains to be found in Nigeria. Nigeria is not yet a mature territory; it is still very prolific,” Slyva explained.
In October 2019, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), the national oil company which is in the forefront of the drilling in the Northern part of the country, announced that it discovered crude oil and gas in the Kolmani River II Well on the Upper Benue Trough, Gongola Basin.
The corporation said then that the commercial viability of the discovery coming from the drilling of a total depth of 13,701 feet before hitting oil and gas in several levels is yet to be ascertained, but that further Drill Stem Test was on-going to confirm the commercial viability and flow of the Kolmani River reservoirs.
