Aliko Dangote's oil company hires three rigs to unlock 1.6 billion barrels

Aliko Dangote's upstream oil company has contracted three jack-up rigs and will start drilling in December, part of a plan to develop more than 1.6 billion barrels of oil in place across two Nigerian blocks it bought from Shell.

Olajumoke Cecilia Ajayi, managing director and chief executive of West African Exploration and Production Company, set out the programme at the AOW Energy Conference in Accra. She said the company expects to have ramped up production and installed gas monetisation infrastructure within 24 months.

"We will be drilling to ramp up production and also bring out the value in the asset," Ajayi said.

Oil Mining Leases 71 and 72 hold more than 1.6 billion barrels of oil in place and about 1.9 trillion cubic feet of gas based on discoveries made so far. WAEP acquired a 45 percent working interest in both from the Shell joint venture in 2015, with the Nigerian National Petroleum Company holding the balance. The blocks sit in shallow water roughly 22 kilometres from the Bonny terminal, and the first discoveries there were made in 1966.

Dangote holds 85 percent of WAEP through Dangote Exploration Assets Limited and Dansa Energy Resources Limited, with First Exploration and Petroleum Development Company Limited holding 15 percent.

Production restarted in December 2025 after a long delay, at 4,500 barrels a day from the Kalaekule field on OML 72. Output on the blocks peaked at 21,000 barrels a day in 1999 before declining from 2003.

Ajayi described a phased approach designed to fund itself.

"The first thing is to look at the low hanging fruit, the short term oil gains, generate cash flow from that, put it back into the assets and start redevelopment," she said. "And that's exactly what is happening currently."

Six field development plan studies are under way, which she said would support a series of back-to-back developments across the portfolio once the drilling campaign finishes.

The company has a buyer waiting. Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals, the 650,000 barrel-a-day plant at Ibeju-Lekki, is owned by the same shareholder that controls WAEP.

"One of the shareholders, one of the partners on this asset, is the owner of the largest refinery in Africa, Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals," Ajayi said. "So the oil would definitely be needed by the refinery."

That arrangement matters beyond the two companies. Nigeria has spent decades exporting crude and importing refined fuel, and a domestic producer feeding a domestic refinery keeps both the barrels and the margin inside the country.

WAEP is also working toward its own crude evacuation terminal, which Ajayi said could serve other producers looking to aggregate and ship, opening a commercial line beyond its own output.

She was speaking on a panel titled The Future of the African Operator: Building the IOCs of Tomorrow, alongside Olumide Ogunfowora, Adegbola Adesina, Temitope Edun and Uduakobong Equere. Ajayi, who is also president of the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists, later moderated a session on Nigeria's basins.

She argued that African companies taking over mature assets from international oil companies face a problem that has little to do with reserves or licences.

"We need to put round pegs in round holes," she said. "We need to put the right skill and competence in the different units."

The test she set for the company was consistency rather than volume.

"Between now and the next 24 months, gas monetisation would have been in place. We would have ramped up production consistently," Ajayi said. "Not produce today, tomorrow you are down. Consistent, sustained production."