Domestic refining has reached 48 million litres per day, but the production figures and divestment claims have not been independently verified

Nigeria's petrol import bill dropped from approximately N2.3 trillion in the first quarter of 2025 to under N90 billion a year later, according to a senior presidential adviser who attributed the decline to rising domestic refining output.

The claim, if it holds under scrutiny, would represent the most consequential shift in Nigeria's downstream energy sector in decades. It arrives as the Tinubu administration prepares its case to investors that the painful 2023 reforms, subsidy removal and exchange-rate liberalization, have produced measurable returns. The numbers cited at a Lagos business forum last week put a specific figure on that case for the first time.

Mrs. Olu Verheijen, Special Adviser to the President on Oil and Gas, made the disclosure at the Nigerian-British Chamber of Commerce Energy Day 2026 in Lagos. The text of her presentation was made available to the News Agency of Nigeria on Tuesday. She was speaking on the topic "Energy in Nigeria: From Potential to Reality."

The Refining Claim

The Federal Government says domestic petrol production has moved from effectively zero in 2023 to approximately 48 million litres per day. Zero is not a rhetorical figure. Nigeria's four state refineries in Port Harcourt, Warri, and Kaduna operated at negligible throughput for years before the current administration took office, and the country was almost entirely dependent on imported refined products.

Verheijen framed the import collapse in currency terms. "For decades, every cargo of imported petrol was a standing demand for scarce dollars, a structural drain that weakened our currency," she said. "As local refining has risen, that drain has eased."

The arithmetic she presented is direct. Fewer naira spent on dollar-denominated fuel cargoes means reduced demand for foreign exchange at the margin. She stated the link explicitly: "Energy security and currency stability are not separate goals. They are the same goal."

What the presentation did not specify is which refinery or refineries account for the 48 million litres per day figure. The Dangote Petroleum Refinery in Lagos, which began phased production in 2024, is the most plausible primary contributor given the scale, but Verheijen's remarks as reported by NAN did not attribute the output by facility. An independent breakdown of production by site has not been released by the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority.

Production Recovery and the Divestment Wave

On the upstream side, Verheijen said crude oil and condensate production averaged 1.64 million barrels per day across 2025, an increase of roughly 400,000 barrels per day since 2023. She described it as the highest onshore production level in two decades.

That recovery coincided with a structural change in asset ownership. Over four billion dollars in international oil company divestments have been concluded, she said, transferring onshore acreages from majors to indigenous operators while the multinationals refocused on deepwater and integrated gas projects. Pipeline uptime, she said, is now "consistently high," and illegal refining operations have been "sharply reduced," though no metric or enforcement data was provided to define either standard.

The divestment figure is notable in context. Shell, TotalEnergies, and Equinor have all announced or completed onshore exits in the Niger Delta over the past two years, citing security and liability concerns. Whether the transition to indigenous operators has sustained or improved production on those blocks is a question the 1.64 million barrels per day figure alone cannot answer, since it covers aggregate national output rather than block-by-block performance.

Revenue and the Reform Argument

Verheijen did not minimize what the administration inherited. She described a sector under "severe strain" in 2023: subsidies fiscally unsustainable, foreign exchange distortions repelling investment, power-sector debt choking the gas-to-power chain. "The country had resources, but the system was not converting them into national value," she said.

The response, as she framed it, was deliberate pain in exchange for structural correction. Removing the fuel subsidy and reforming the exchange rate were "hard, but necessary" decisions. The revenue outcome she cited: total federation revenue rose to approximately N21 trillion in 2024, up from roughly N12 trillion in 2023.

That near-doubling in a single year is largely a mechanical consequence of naira devaluation, since oil revenues remitted to the federation account are dollar-denominated and inflate in naira terms when the exchange rate weakens. The presentation did not disaggregate the revenue increase between volume growth and currency translation effects. That distinction matters for assessing whether the upstream recovery represents real productive expansion or an accounting artifact of a weaker naira.

One concrete measure Verheijen cited against the deregulation critics: the chronic petrol queues that once defined scarcity have not returned. That is an observable fact on the ground in Lagos and Abuja that independent observers have confirmed, even if the cause remains contested between government policy and the role of the Dangote refinery.

What Remains Unresolved

The story is not settled. The 48 million litres per day production figure has not been verified by an independent regulator, and the NMDPRA has not published a corresponding monthly output report for the current quarter that would allow cross-checking. The import collapse from N2.3 trillion to under N90 billion is presented as a quarterly comparison over roughly twelve months, but the base currency for both figures is the naira, which depreciated sharply during the same period, meaning the import volume decline in physical terms could differ significantly from the naira figures suggest.

The Nigerian Customs Service, which records import volumes in metric tonnes rather than naira, has not released a public reconciliation of refined product import data for the first quarter of 2026. That figure, when published, will either corroborate Verheijen's account or complicate it.