Nigeria’s upstream oil and gas regulator has told investors holding flare gas sites that their awards are not permanent entitlements. Companies that cannot show real progress within a year of receiving an award risk losing it.
The warning came from Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, Commission Chief Executive of the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, during a working visit to the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources (Gas), Ekperikpe Ekpo, in Abuja on Tuesday, September 8, 2026. The Commission disclosed her remarks in a statement issued by its Head of Corporate Communications and Media, Eniola Akinkuotu.
“One year after an award has been granted, the Commission conducts an evaluation to determine whether there has been considerable progress,” Eyesan said, according to the statement. “Where there is insufficient progress, the Commission will take appropriate regulatory action, including revocation of the award where necessary.”
The subject is the Nigerian Gas Flare Commercialisation Programme, the scheme through which the Federal Government offers gas that would otherwise be burned at oil production sites to third party investors who commit to capturing and monetising it. Eyesan said 43 flare gas sites were originally identified for award under the programme, of which 27 have so far been awarded, with implementation ongoing. She said the programme had continued to record progress despite what she described as initial resistance from some operators.
Those figures differ from earlier official announcements. When the Commission concluded the restructured 2022 bid cycle, it said 42 companies and consortia had been awarded 49 flare sites, with 38 entities taking 40 sites for standalone development and four taking nine sites to be developed as clusters. In December 2025, under Eyesan’s predecessor Gbenga Komolafe, the Commission issued Permits to Access Flare Gas to 28 of those awardees after they executed connection, milestone development and gas sales agreements. This week’s statement did not explain the difference between the earlier site count and the numbers now cited, and the Commission has not published a reconciliation of the two sets of figures.
What is clearer is the programme’s long timeline. The Federal Government launched the NGFCP in December 2016 under then Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, as one of a set of reform initiatives for the oil and gas sector. The defunct Department of Petroleum Resources announced the identification of 49 flare sites in February 2020, and about 226 companies had submitted bids before the process stalled at the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic. NUPRC restructured and relaunched the programme in the third quarter of 2022 under sections 7(e) and 105(2) of the Petroleum Industry Act, drawing roughly 300 expressions of interest. Of these, 139 applicants were qualified, and 88 entities submitted 137 proposals before the awards were announced in September 2023. Nearly a decade after launch, the programme is only now reaching the stage where regulators are assessing whether awardees are actually building anything.
That is the context in which the revocation threat matters. NUPRC has projected that the awarded portfolio could capture and commercialise between 250 and 300 million standard cubic feet per day of currently flared gas, eliminate roughly six million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually, attract up to $2bn in investment, create more than 100,000 jobs, and produce 170,000 tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas a year, enough to supply clean cooking access for about 1.4 million households. These remain programme projections rather than realised outcomes, and they depend entirely on awardees converting paper rights into physical infrastructure.
On the resource base, Eyesan said Nigeria currently holds more than 215 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves and an estimated total reserve base of about 600 trillion cubic feet, describing these as a foundation for power generation, industrialisation, exports and wider economic development.
The volumes still being flared are substantial, though the exact figure depends on the source. NUPRC’s own 2025 Gas Production Status Report put flaring at 203.9 billion standard cubic feet for the year, equal to 7.54 per cent of total gas production of 2.71 trillion standard cubic feet, and up from 192.9 billion standard cubic feet in 2024. The National Oil Spill Detection and Remediation Agency, which tracks flares through a separate methodology, reported a considerably higher 323 billion standard cubic feet for 2025, valuing the loss at about $1.1bn and estimating 17.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. The two agencies measure and report differently, and the gap between their numbers has not been publicly reconciled. Readers should treat either figure as an estimate from a specific source rather than a settled national total.
More recent NUPRC data suggests some improvement. Gas flared in the first quarter of 2026 fell to 46.83 billion standard cubic feet from 50.95 billion in the same quarter of 2025, a decline of about 8.1 per cent, while flare intensity eased from 7.65 per cent to 6.81 per cent. Total gas production over the same period rose to 687.09 billion standard cubic feet from 667.27 billion.
For his part, Ekpo used the meeting to press for faster implementation, tying it to Nigeria’s stated target of ending routine flaring by 2030. “The core objective is to add value to our gas resources by converting them into critical products and services. We must move away from environmental pollution and toward productive resource utilisation,” the minister said.
The 2030 date is itself a tightening of earlier ambition. When the flare commercialisation awards were announced in 2023, official commentary referenced zero routine flaring by 2035 alongside net zero emissions by 2060. NUPRC has since publicly committed to the 2030 flare out target and to cutting methane emissions by 60 per cent by 2031.
Eyesan also reported progress on host community obligations under the Petroleum Industry Act, saying 173 Host Community Development Trusts had been incorporated, 147 funded, more than 1,001 projects were ongoing, and over 200 projects had been commissioned.
Whether the revocation threat changes behaviour will only be measurable when the Commission publishes the results of its one year performance evaluations. Until then, the central question for the programme remains unchanged from the day it launched: how much of the gas Nigeria burns each year is actually being captured.