Nigeria’s Decade of Gas at Midpoint: Progress, Gaps and the Path Forward

Report
14 September 2026

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Key messages

Nigeria’s Decade of Gas initiative was launched in 2021 with the goal of transforming the country into a gas-powered economy by 2030. It reaffirms ambitions outlined in previous strategies like the 2008 Gas Master Plan and the 2017 National Gas Policy. However, a changed economic context, a transformed global energy market and the relatively large scale of potential risks in gas investment mean these earlier ambitions would benefit from being revisited.
Since 2021, six upstream projects have started production, and three more have reached financial investment decision (FID). However, based on current trends, new production will fall far below the 2030 target (4.6 billion cubic feet per day (BCFD) expansion over the 2020 level). This report shows that even in the most expansive scenario, only about 1.3 BCFD of new gas production will be added by 2030.
Beyond 2030: although overall gas production is projected to keep rising in the first half of the next decade, external demand for Nigeria’s gas will likely decline in the latter half of the 2030s as well as in the decades to follow. Key consumers are predicted to move increasingly away from fossil fuels. This would mean a loss in export revenue reaching billions of dollars annually.
The Decade of Gas initiative is rooted in national development priorities, including meeting domestic energy needs. However, a major share of these new gas volumes is likely to be directed towards liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, leaving between 20 to 30 percent for domestic use and meeting wider development goals.
Upstream gas production capacity is constrained by midstream infrastructure deficits and entrenched downstream market failures, many of which have persisted for close to two decades. These structural challenges—especially in the power sector, which suffers from payment illiquidity and debt overhang—have affected the bankability of domestic demand.
The global energy landscape is in a state of flux with energy transition considerations and energy security priorities, creating marked uncertainty about long-term demand. These demand considerations and the macroeconomic challenges associated with continued fossil fuel dependence are a major risk in a business-as-usual approach of doubling down on large-scale gas sector expansion.
Nigeria needs a right-sized development pathway that can incorporate the country’s gas ambitions, while integrating alternative energy routes to expanding energy access and foregrounding the importance of an economic diversification strategy that reduces the country’s acute reliance on oil and gas.

Executive summary

Nigeria faces a challenging task ahead. The impact of external shocks like the oil price crash of 2014, the COVID-19 crisis as well as geopolitical events in Europe and more recently in the Middle East have led to worsened living standards for many ordinary Nigerians. Poverty and food insecurity are a major concern, and it is likely that these could worsen as global economic growth faces headwinds from geopolitical instability.

Within this wider economic context is the Nigerian government’s Decade of Gas initiative, which began in 2021 and is currently at its mid-point, representing an opportunity for transformative sustainable development. The initiative has aimed to provide fresh impetus to Nigeria’s gas sector with a gas-based sustainable development agenda underpinned by the country’s approach to gas as a transition fuel.

In this report, we undertake an assessment of the Decade of Gas initiative, taking the upstream sector as the starting point of the analysis. Much of the Decade of Gas initiative’s development agenda hinges on the availability of new volumes of gas production to drive goals such as improving energy access (through increased gas-based electricity production); gas for clean cooking and transportation; and gas-based industrialization, as well as ramping up export earnings.

Our analysis shows that in 2030—which would mark ten years since the launch of the initiative—new upstream gas production would not meet the targets set at the outset. We find that, even in the most expansive scenario, about 1.3 billion cubic feet per day (BCFD) of new gas production would come online by 2030, this is only about a third of the target of an additional 4.6 BCFD. In addition, most of this new capacity is targeted towards exports rather than domestic usage that would support domestic development goals. We highlight structural limitations that challenge gas-sector development and the risks that come from an expansive gas-infrastructure build-out.

For this analysis, we combined desk-based research with semi-structured stakeholder interviews, surveys as well as in-person and online workshops. We highlight some key challenges on the supply and downstream-demand side, coupled with midstream infrastructure deficits that have limited upstream expansion. Many of the challenges we highlight present structural limitations for effective implementation of the Decade of Gas in its current framework.

Two decades of unresolved structural limitations, a transformed global energy landscape, a challenging business environment and a constrained governance context mean that doubling down on large-scale gas expansion without recalibrating ambitions or strengthening complementarities with other sectors could undermine Nigeria’s development agenda. This implies that a business-as-usual approach to the Decade of Gas initiative would introduce more risks for the Nigerian economy, with an uncertain prospect for success. We therefore recommend a right-sized approach, which balances ambition with feasibility and accounts for potential challenges posed by the two major sources of risk: the energy transition and macroeconomic risk.