The Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) said the country’s yearly oil and gas investment fell by about $22 billion between 2014 and 2023, dropping from about $24 billion to roughly $2 billion.

The Commission Chief Executive, Mrs Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, said the more than 90 per cent decline in investment over the period had depleted the country’s pool of geoscientists, petroleum engineers and other critical technical professionals, raising concerns about the capacity required as investment and project development return to the sector.

Eyesan spoke during the “Setting the Agenda” panel on Local Content & Human Capital under PIA 2021 & NOGICD, held on the second day of the Oil and Gas Trainers Association of Nigeria (OGTAN) Human Capacity Development Conference and Expo at the Petroleum Training Institute, Effurun, Delta State.

She said the prolonged investment contraction did not only affect capital spending and exploration activity but also triggered a corresponding erosion of human capital, with geoscientists among the first professionals to leave the industry when companies began cutting budgets.

According to her, petroleum engineers were subsequently affected as the downturn deepened, with some made redundant while others were increasingly restricted to maintenance functions as operators moved from expansion to survival.

Eyesan said the industry was now moving in a positive direction, with renewed investment and project development creating an urgent requirement for a new generation of highly specialised professionals.

The renewed investment comes amid efforts by the Federal Government to improve the economics of upstream projects, including President Bola Tinubu’s Deep Offshore Oil and Gas Projects Incentives (Tax Remission) Order, 2026, signed on August 6.

The order provides production tax credits for qualifying deep offshore project developments and is designed to improve the economics of projects reaching Final Investment Decision (FID) within the specified window.

Eyesan said renewed investment following the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) and business-oriented initiatives of the Tinubu administration was beginning to revive exploration, but warned that human capacity remained a major challenge.

She said Nigeria could no longer prepare oil and gas professionals using curricula designed primarily for an earlier generation of petroleum operations.

Eyesan identified digitalised operations, advanced geoscience, digital twins and digital drilling technologies among the competencies that should now form part of the industry’s core workforce development strategy.

She said the transformation was significant because modern upstream projects increasingly depended on the ability to integrate subsurface data, real-time field information, automation, modelling and advanced analytics into investment and operational decisions.

“Training curricula need to evolve,” she said, cautioning that Nigeria was still behind where it needed to be in developing the competencies required by a rapidly changing industry.

For Nigeria, Eyesan said, training institutions, operators, regulators and academia must move beyond simply replacing workers lost during the downturn and build a workforce capable of operating the digital oilfield of the next investment cycle.

She also linked human capital development directly to Nigeria’s competitiveness for investment, using the analogy that capital behaves like water and flows towards areas of least resistance.

Eyesan argued that Nigeria’s workforce must become more commercially oriented if the country is to capture greater value from the next wave of oil and gas investment.

She explained that technical professionals increasingly needed to understand the commercial consequences of their decisions, while commercial professionals needed sufficient technical understanding to operate effectively within increasingly complex energy projects.

Eyesan further called for a fundamental change in how Nigeria approaches human capacity development. (The Guardian)

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