nigerian oil--2/17/2026

17 Feb 2026

nigerian oil--2/17/2026

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Today's selection-- from Empty Vessel by Ian Kumekawa. The sudden expansion of Nigeria’s oil resources:

"Nigeria is the tenth most oil-rich country in the world. Over the course of the 1990s, and much of the 2000s, Nigerian oil production—especially offshore production—rose. Output surged from around 1.8 million barrels a day to more than 2.4 million barrels a day, about what Britain was producing at the height of its oil boom in the 1980s. Then, as now, the Nigerian oil business functioned through public-private cooperation. Technically, only the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) is licensed to operate in the industry. But since its formation in the late 1970s, NNPC has partnered with huge American and European multinationals, particularly Shell, Mobil, and Chevron. In short, though Nigeria's oil production is officially nationalized (a condition of joining OPEC in1971), the country has largely privatized and outsourced its operation.

“Who controls Nigeria's oil and who profits from it are questions of critical importance, not least because of oil's centrality to Nigerian economic and political life. These questions have divided stakeholders, regions, and ethnic groups in the country since independence, and they lay behind the deadly Biafran War, which claimed well over half a million lives between 1967 and 1970. Since then, oil has only become more important to the national economy. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Nigeria was unambiguously an oil state; its politics were petro-politics. When STG purchased The Weare from the British government in 2006, oil rents (the value crude oil produced minus the cost of its production) accounted for about a sixth of the country's GDP. As importantly, oil sales accounted for almost the entirety of Nigeria's exports. And despite rampant corruption—estimated in 2004 to eat up some 40 percent of oil revenues—sales from oil made up the overwhelming majority of the federal budget: nearly 90 percent in 2006. Offshore oil was of special importance for the Nigerian federal government. Under Nigerian law, individual state governments had claim to a portion of the revenue derived from oil produced within their territory. But oil that was extracted tens, if not hundreds, of miles off the Nigerian coast was different. Proceeds from offshore oil were commonly understood co be the sole property of the federal government.

“Offshore oil, then, undergirded the state. And for better or worse, Nigeria had a lot of it, both close to shore and farther out. In early 1982, after a decade of debate and negotiation, the United Nations promulgated a new convention on the law of the sea to update the terms decided at the 1964 convention, which had sec off che scramble for North Sea oil and gas.The changes made in 1982 proved particularly dramatic and portentous for coastal West African countries. Under the1964 convention, states had clear jurisdiction over the ocean floor up to the edge of the continental shelf bordering their coast. The continental shelf, in turn, was defined geologically, by depth: it was the part of the ocean floor abutting a coastline less than two hundred meters below the surface. That changed in 1982. Instead of defining the continental shelf (and thereby national sovereignty) by ocean depth, the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) redefined it as the part of the seafloor that lay two hundred miles from the coast, regardless of how far beneath the waves the floor lay.

Coat of arms of Nigeria in current use

“The change in the definition was driven by the geopolitics of international governance. Whereas northern Europe and the Atlantic Coast of North America have wide geological shelves, much of the rest of the world does not. When the first UN convention took place, European and North American states had enough votes and power to draft the international law of the sea to their own ends. Defining shelves by depth did just that. Countries including the United States, Britain, and Norway were granted rights to the ocean floor hundreds of miles from their coasts. Countries like Nigeria, by contrast, were accorded rights over only a relatively narrow shelf—in Nigeria's case, some fifty miles wide. Nigeria had joined the UN six days after gaining its independence in October 1960, which meant that it had been able to vote on the 1964 convention. But dozens of newly decolonized states in Africa and the Asia Pacific region had missed this opportunity. By the 1970s, when the UN began debate on the UNCLOS (1982), the organization contained far more postcolonial member states than it had two decades before. Many of these states were islands (Samoa, Nauru, Tonga, and Fiji, for example), and many others—especially in Latin America—had coastlines with very narrow geological continental shelves. For all these states, defining continental shelves in terms of the distance from the coast, rather than depth, was a matter of major importance. As in Caribbean tax havens, at the UN, decolonization would fundamentally shape the growth of the offshore world.

“In the United Nations, each country, regardless of size or military expenditure, wields a single vote. Today, this organizing feature of the UN has given low-lying island nations leverage in the global struggle against climate change. In the 1970s, the UN's voting rules gave many of the same nations the power to seize control over fossil fuels buried off their coastlines. In those years, states with geologically narrow continental shelves collectively exerted tremendous power in the UN—enough to change the very definition of the continental shelf. This change was hugely important for Nigeria, whose continental shelf almost quadrupled under the new definition. After 1982, Nigeria and other West African states suddenly found themselves with jurisdiction over vast new tracts of the ocean floor. As a result, they also found themselves in possession of much more offshore oil than they were short months before. Almost overnight, offshore exploration and extraction boomed; there were dizzying profits to be made far below the surface of the Bight of Biafra and the Gulf of Guinea.”