Hydrocarbon Potentials in Nigeria’s Frontier Basins: The Current State of Our Knowledge Through R&D

Frontier basins are those basins on which available exploration data are very scanty. Although data on Nigeria’s frontier basins were very scanty many years ago, significant volumes of R&D and industry/operators data have progressively accumulated. Such generated and/or scouted data have helped greatly to de-risk and mature many of the listed frontier basins. Nigeria’s frontier basins comprise the Anambra Basin, Benue Trough (lower, middle, upper), Bida Basin, Chad Basin (Nigerian sector), Dahomey Basin, Sokoto Basin and the deep and ultra-deep Niger Delta offshore. Overwhelmingly, research results along with operators’ engagements have graded the basinal maturity vis-a-vis the risk elements into the low-risk Anambra and Dahomey Basins where there are operators engagements and discoveries (Orient Petroleum, Yinka Folawiyon), moderate risk Benue Trough and Chad Basin, where NNPC is actively engaged with significant success in the Gongola Sub-Basin, and high-risk Bida and Sokoto Basins where there are presently no operators, but rather an active data generation by researchers and data gathering by the NNPC. The status of the deep and ultra-deep offshore is not certain. Many of the risk elements may be downgraded with committed exploration programmes of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and the increased funding to R&D by the Corporation and other sources. Research results from different sources are presented in the paper to elucidate our current knowledge of the frontier basins.