Landmark book on Nigeria’s petroleum industry out next week

Author: Adedayo Ojo

A monumental book on Nigeria’s petroleum industry – Milestones, Makers & Memos: An Encyclopedia of the Landmarks, Legends and Lessons of the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry (1889–2025) – by Adedayo Ojo, is set for unveiling at the 44th yearly conference of the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists (NAPE) starting on 8 November at the Eko Hotels and Suites, Victoria Island, Lagos.

According to Ojo, “Milestones, Makers & Memos spans more than 800 pages and took ten years to compile. It is the first single-volume work pairing the industry’s landmark events with biographical profiles of the people behind them, covering upstream, midstream, and downstream from 1889 to 2025.”

But, why 1889? Ojo asked

“That year, on 12 September, was when the statute ( Ordinance 12 of 1889) was issued, to regulate the importation, carriage, storage and sale of petroleum and other substances of an inflammable and dangerous nature.” It made the Collector of Customs Nigeria’s first petroleum licensing authority and imposed a penalty of twenty pounds per day for keeping petroleum without a licence. Rules made under the ordinance on 1 February 1890 established a Government Petroleum Magazine at Kokomaiko, charging a penny per case each month. The text he said in the book survives in the revised ordinances of the Colony of Lagos, beginning on page 613.

The book’s central structural finding follows from this: colonial Nigeria operated two petroleum statutes in parallel. A downstream regime, dating from 1889, governed how petroleum was landed, stored, and sold; an upstream regime, established by the Mineral Oils Ordinance of 1914, governed who could search for it. Almost all existing literature on Nigerian oil focuses only on the latter.”

“We were a petroleum market before we were a petroleum producer. That line runs unbroken through 1908, 1916, and 1927 and ends at the NMDPRA today. Nobody had written it down.” Ojo also stated in the book

This book arrives as the industry’s record-keeping grows thinner. Nigeria’s upstream sector now has 117 operating companies, up from fewer than ten in 2010, while production has dropped from about 2.6 million barrels of crude per day to roughly 1.6 million. Over the same four years, the three largest custodians of the industry’s corporate memory have all changed names: Shell’s SPDC became Renaissance Africa Energy in March 2025, Mobil Producing Nigeria became Seplat in December 2024, and NNPC became NNPC Limited.

“More companies, fewer barrels — and the institutions that held the paperwork have all been renamed over the past four years,” Ojo said. Adding: “A generation of files sits in boxes that no one has opened. I started this ten years ago because I could see memory going.”

The book treats 1977 to 1996 as the industry’s pivotal period, spanning the creation of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation in 1977 and the opening of the deepwater frontier. Among the events the book documents are the nationalization of British Petroleum’s remaining Nigerian holdings in 1979, the commercialization of NNPC, the incorporation of Nigeria LNG in 1989, and the first indigenous private oil discovery.

Ojo spent 15 years in senior corporate affairs and public policy roles at ExxonMobil in Nigeria and the United States. He is the founder and chairman of Caritas Communications Limited and the founder and managing principal of Adedayo-Ojo Consulting, LLC.