Nigeria: Saudi, UAE State Oil Firms look to Invest In Nigeria

Saudi Aramco and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) are considering investing in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector, including in the upstream, midstream, and downstream, Mele Kyari, the head of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), said on Tuesday.

Representatives of ADNOC and NNPC are scheduled to meet on Wednesday to discuss potential investments in Nigeria’s energy sector, S&P Global Platts quoted Kyari as saying at an energy conference in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

According to NNPC’s managing director Kyari, both ADNOC and Aramco—the state oil giants of two of OPEC’s largest producers—are looking at opportunities to invest in Nigeria and are prepared to invest in low-risk ventures.

Nigeria’s state oil corporation prefers investments in the midstream sector—in pipelines and refining, NNPC’s chief noted, as carried by S&P Global Platts.

The Saudi state giant is considering using Nigeria as a platform to sell gasoline in West Africa, he added.

Aramco and ADNOC are not directly offering any products to Nigeria, which relies on fuel imports—mostly from Europe—to meet its growing fuel demand.

Nigeria aims to pump as much as 4 million bpd in six years’ time—a goal that analysts think may be too ambitious for the country to achieve.

At the conference in the UAE today, Kyari said that Nigeria hopes it could boost its oil production to around 3 million bpd over the next two to three years. According to the latest OPEC figures, Nigeria’s crude oil production averaged 1.866 million bpd in August, up by 86,000 bpd from July.

The West African country is also looking to OPEC’s largest producer Saudi Arabia to secure potential investments in its downstream sector. Earlier this year, the then oil and energy ministers of Nigeria and Saudi Arabia met and expressed “the strong readiness of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to sign a definite and high value Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Nigeria for oil sector development.”

A possible agreement will open the doors for Nigeria to “potentially benefit from Saudi Arabia’s and effectively, Saudi Aramco’s recent aggressive oil sector investments across the globe while serving as the nerve centre for its presence in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Nigeria’s former oil minister Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu said in April.