Nigeria’s state-owned NNPC Ltd. Began drilling for oil and gas at a field with 1 billion barrels of reserves in northern Nigeria as the nation aims to produce petroleum outside of the Niger Delta for the first time.
Phase one of the Kolmani project in the northeast, according to NNPC, would include an oil refinery, a gas processing unit, a 300 megawatt power plant, and a fertilizer facility that can produce 2,500 tonnes of fertilizer per day.
Northeastern Nigeria’s Kolmani area, between the states of Bauchi and Gombe, is home to an Islamist insurgency and has been the site of commercial-scale oil, gas, and condensate discoveries, according to NNPC Ltd.
Kolmani, according to President Muhammadu Buhari, has 500 billion cubic feet of gas and 1 billion barrels of oil reserves.
Nigeria has been looking for oil in border basins in the country’s primarily impoverished north for years, notably the Lake Chad Basin, which is the center of the Islamist insurgency.