Despite increasing violence perpetuated by a militant movement that wants change, Nigeria is calling on foreign firms to invest in the country's untapped oil and gas reserves.
"World-class giant oil and gas fields have been found in the Niger Delta Basin and the Gulf of Guinea," wrote Nigeria's Oil Minister Edmund Daukoru in a paper presented earlier this month at the African Oil and Gas Forum in Bethesda, Md. "So we have many open blocks available for interested investors to develop."
The basin, he said, could yield as many as 180 million barrels, enough to entice energy-hungry nations such as China, which has sunk more than $2 billion in Nigeria.
Daukoru, who is the current president of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, also projected the creation of 2,000 high-end engineering jobs in the next 15 years.
His optimism about, and enthusiasm for, the Nigerian hydrocarbon sector comes amid widespread production shortfalls due to constant attacks on oil installations by militants who take workers hostage and force production shutdowns in Africa's No. 1 oil producer.
Last month, militants abducted several foreign oil workers aboard an Italian oil vessel off the coast of the delta and killed a British worker, prompting some oil companies to question whether they have a long-term future in Nigeria.
In the delta, where much of the country's onshore oil extraction takes place, the billions of dollars extracted from the region has caused unrest and given birth to the militant group known as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, which calls for greater profit-sharing.
MEND has also been blamed for costing Nigeria between 600,000-900,000 barrels per day in production losses, somewhere between 20-40 percent of the country's total production potential.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo is optimistic, however, about the region's economic potential, and last month assured investors the situation there "was becoming more controllable."
Hoping to divert attention away from the delta's woes, Obasanjo praised the working group known as the Niger Delta Development Commission for its efforts to address development needs in the delta and attributed a recent spike in violence to the impatience of some Nigerians who think all the region's troubles can be resolved overnight.
The majority -- nearly 60 percent -- of the country's 130 million inhabitants live below the poverty line, according to a World Bank survey.
While the violence has certainly sparked concerns among many oil workers about their safety, Big Oil's largest companies aren't shying away from Nigeria, noted Stephen Morrison, director of the Africa Program and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"Look at the kind of money that was shelled out by Chinese this year," said Morrison to United Press International, referring to the $2.3 billion stake China bought in Nigeria's offshore oil and gas fields.
China, whose energy needs are growing at a greater pace than any nation, has been scouring the globe searching for fresh sources of oil. In the last year, China National Offshore Oil Corp., China's largest offshore oil producer, has made forays into several African nations among them Nigeria, Angola and Sudan.
Morrison noted, however, that Nigeria's petroleum sector has "some reputation problems," though many firms were still willing to overlook them, including top U.S. and European oil producers such as Shell, the largest foreign firm operating in Nigeria.
"The international oil companies out there are very interested in locking up new reserves and there are very few places where that can happen, where they aren't closed out by national policy," he said.
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