Nigeria must build a modern, highly skilled upstream workforce to fully capitalise on new offshore investment opportunities, attract foreign capital, and lift crude oil production to three million barrels per day by 2030, the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, NUPRC, has said.
NUPRC’s Chief Executive, Mrs Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, stated this at the inaugural Human Capital Development Conference and Expo 2026, organised by the Oil and Gas Trainers Association of Nigeria, OGTAN, in Warri on Thursday.
Eyesan said the recent signing by President Bola Tinubu of the Deep Offshore Oil and Gas Project Incentives, Tax Remission, Executive Order 2026, which is projected to unlock up to $50 billion in new offshore investments and generate thousands of jobs.
A statement by NUPRC’s Head of Media and Corporate Communications, Eniola Akinkuotu, disclosed this in a statement following remarks by the Commission’s
Eyesan said a decade-long decline in offshore oil and gas investment had left the industry with a significant skills gap.
She noted that Nigeria attracted as much as $26 billion in oil and gas investment in 2014, but that figure had fallen to roughly $2 billion annually by 2023.
“In that period, the first that we lost were the geoscientists. Once the budget cuts started, there was no more exploration, so the geoscientists had to be offloaded.
“Then some petroleum engineers became casualties because, for operators, it was no longer about drilling new wells but survival mode, just maintenance and what have you. Our infrastructure was heavily derated because we were not investing,” she said.
With new investment now flowing back into the sector, Eyesan said the industry must rebuild its talent base from the ground up.
“We want to see an upward trajectory. It stands to reason that you must go back to the basics. First of all, we need the right competencies in subsurface,” she said.
She added, however, that the skills required today go well beyond the technical expertise the industry relied on in the past.
“What happened in 2014 is not what we are facing today, because the digital age has taken over the business. So you’re not just looking at a driller anymore. Today, you are talking about digital- you must know how to digitally drill,” she said.
Eyesan identified six priority competency areas requiring urgent development:
Digitalisation, artificial intelligence and data analytics
Advanced subsurface and reservoir management
Commercial, fiscal and regulatory expertise
Gas development and energy transition competencies
Asset integrity, HSE and decommissioning management
Project leadership, stakeholder management and multidisciplinary collaboration.
She said strengthening these competencies would be essential to ensuring Nigeria’s workforce is fully prepared to support renewed investment, boost production, and maximise the benefits of the government’s ongoing upstream sector reforms.
