Nigeria has opened bidding on 40 oil and gas blocks, promising investors greater transparency. In the same week, stakeholders at a just transition dialogue in Abuja argued that communities living beside extraction still lack the transparency they need to hold companies to account.
What the licensing round offers
Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, Commission Chief Executive of the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC), launched the Nigeria 2026 Licensing Round at the commission’s fifth anniversary in Abuja on Tuesday. The round covers 40 blocks across land, shallow-water and deepwater terrains. Eyesan said the approval came from President Bola Tinubu, who also doubles as Minister of Petroleum Resources.
Following recommendations from the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), the guidelines will set out the full evaluation methodology and publish results in details. They will also require every bidder to disclose its beneficial owners.
“Investors go where rules are clear, processes are predictable and data can be trusted,” Eyesan noted.
The commission said it would publish block details, qualification requirements and participation procedures on its website and licensing portal in the coming days.
The round follows the 2025 exercise, in which 143 companies submitted 200 bids. Thirty-one companies won 37 blocks, while 13 of the 50 blocks on offer drew no bids. Eyesan said the 2025 blocks could add about 500 million barrels to Nigeria’s reserves and support gas production of 20 billion standard cubic feet a day.
What host communities are asking for
Days before the Africa Climate Forum opens in Abuja, the Federal Ministry of Environment held a dialogue on Africa’s just transition. It worked with the University of Bristol, Taraba State University, The British Academy and the Society for Planet and Prosperity. Stakeholders said host communities remain marginalised and inadequately compensated by government and operating firms, despite bearing the environmental costs of extraction.
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Eche Asuzu, National Coordinator of the Nigeria Labour Congress’s Climate Change, Green Jobs and Just Transition Programme, said institutional and political factors decide who gains and who loses from transition projects. He said communities often feel excluded. As an example, he cited lithium operations run by foreign companies, where hundreds of trucks carry the mineral out while surrounding communities lack basic infrastructure. Nigeria has policies to protect affected communities, he said, but poor implementation and weak monitoring remain the problem.
Asuzu called for Community Development Agreements, the deals that mining companies must conclude with host communities, to be published on a public portal. Residents could then read them and use them to demand accountability. Elizabeth Essien, of the Department of Environmental Management at the University of Calabar, called for governance structures that let communities take part in, and benefit from, Nigeria’s transition programmes. Stakeholders urged government to monitor the situation, involve all parties and give affected communities a way to raise concerns.
Transparency for whom?
The two announcements apply different standards of openness. The licensing guidelines, as described so far, focus on transparency between bidders and the regulator: who owns the companies, how bids are scored and what the results show. None of the published accounts of the launch mentions environmental conditions, remediation obligations or host-community terms. The detailed guidelines are still to come, so those provisions may yet appear.
This matters because of the record already documented in ConservationsNG’s reporting. Bayelsa produces roughly a fifth of Nigeria’s oil. In 2023, the “An Environmental Genocide” report called for a recovery agency and a $12 billion clean-up fund there, and neither exists. The Nembe Creek spill in August and the unrepaired Azuzuama leak, now more than three months old, show the continuing cost to the communities concerned.
Under the 2021 Petroleum Industry Act, oil-producing communities receive a small, fixed percentage of operators’ expenditure through a Host Communities Trust Fund. UNDP analysis notes that no comparable framework yet exists for communities hosting renewable energy projects.
What to watch
The Africa Climate Forum runs on October 13 and 14. Its listed themes include the just transition, community-led climate action and carbon markets. Three tests will show whether the transparency drive reaches beyond investors:
- Licensing conditions: whether the full guidelines carry environmental and remediation conditions for winning bidders.
- Published agreements: whether the documents that govern community benefits are made public. In mining, that means Community Development Agreements, as Asuzu urged. In oil and gas, it means host community trust accounts and development plans.
- Existing blocks: whether beneficial-ownership disclosure extends to operators of blocks already producing, such as OML 29 in Bayelsa.
