The Nigerian independent, Belema Oil Limited, has staunchly remained the producer of a trickle of crude, averaging 210 Barels of Oil Per Day (BOPD), from the Oil Mining Lease (OML) 55 in June 2025, ten years after the company purchased Chevron’s 45% of the asset and secured its operatorship, in JV with NNPC.
The low output is not as a result of unfavourabe geology. Indeed, the asset can optimally produce 7,500BOPD. And Chevron was producing as much at the time of its divestment. The Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC)’s forecast for OML 55 in first half of 2025 is 7,400BOPD. So Belema Oil is actively punching below its weight.
When the company announced the installation of an FSO, a loud putter of applause went up. But now, the excuse is that the evacuation through barges, which load and go to discharge at the manifold on the Inda field, en route to the Bonny Terminal, may be a key constraint.
Meanwhile, Dubri Oil’s Gele Gele and Ovia Fields in OML 96 were the first producing asset to be operated by an indigenous Nigerian company. The fields produced an average of 186 BOPD in 2024. NUPRC’s forecast production from OML 96 in 1H 2025 is 151 BOPD, the lowest forecast for any producing upstream acreage in the country.
Phillips Petroleum (now Phillips 66) operated the licence until 1986 and Dubri Oil took it over in 1987, becoming the first indigenous company to operate a producing acreage in Nigeria. The asset is located on the western flank of the Niger Delta, so, on the face of it, the prospectivity should not be as favourable as what one expects in the proximal part of the basin.
But here’s the thing: the Benin sands reach as deep as 7,000feet True Vertical Depth and so does the Agbada formation (parallic sequence), which is the basin’s go-to prospective formation.
So why isn’t OML 96 gushing? One possible answer is that there has also not been a determined campaign to robustly evaluate and optimise the asset.
SOURCE: africaoilgasreport.com
