SPECIAL REPORT: Inside Nigeria’s methane problem

The hearth at Inua Eyet Ikot doesn’t exit. Day and night time, a flare stack operated by Network Exploration & Production Nigeria casts an orange glow over this oil-rich neighborhood in Akwa Ibom State, radiating warmth because it burns.

“That’s how the fire burns nonstop,” stated Sunday Okon, a safety guard stationed a kilometer from the stack. “It can be really hot here, and sometimes you feel the vibration.”

Half a kilometer nearer to the flame, Idiok Godwin, a neighborhood bricklayer, shares his expertise. “We cannot use rainwater here, and some nights it can be very hot,” he stated. “People get ill too.”

The issues they describe level to a contradiction on the coronary heart of Nigeria’s oil and fuel business. Globally, Nigeria has forged itself more and more as an environmental champion, drafting a few of the continent’s strictest rules on polluting fuel emissions, and committing to eliminating fuel flaring by 2030.

On the bottom, nonetheless, flaring just isn’t lowering. Driven by weak regulatory enforcement and a company apply the place oil majors take away emissions liabilities from their books after promoting ageing belongings to native operators, the nation is burning extra fuel at this time than it did three years in the past.

At the centre of the flaring is methane, the principal part of related fuel launched throughout crude oil manufacturing. While burning converts most of it into carbon dioxide, portions of unburned methane escape by means of incomplete flaring, intentional venting, and leaking infrastructure.

Though short-lived within the environment, methane is an environmental pollutant. It traps roughly 80 instances extra warmth than carbon dioxide over a 20-year interval.

Experts view methane discount because the quickest solution to gradual international warming, a precedence for Nigeria which generated 16 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa’s oil-and-gas methane emissions between 2010 and 2020, based on the Natural Resource Governance Institute.

On paper, Nigeria is critical concerning the discount. In 2021, the federal government signed the Global Methane Pledge and enacted the Petroleum Industry Act, empowering the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) to supervise operators and seize fuel slated for flaring. Nigeria grew to become one of many methane pledge’s champions, alongside the EU, America, Canada, Germany and Japan.

Subsequent guidelines in 2022 and 2023 mandated leak repairs, rigorous emissions monitoring, and annual public disclosures detailing flaring penalties. Nigeria’s local weather plan – the up to date Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) submitted in 2021 – promised a 60% minimize in fugitive methane emissions from oil and fuel by 2031, zero fuel flaring by 2030 and economy-wide net-zero by 2060. An up to date model of the plan pushed the 60% fugitive-emissions goal to 2035.

Not a lot has modified in apply. World Bank data analyzed by Pluboard exhibits that after a decade of regular reductions, Nigeria’s flaring volumes reversed course. Operators flared 6.6 billion cubic meters of fuel in 2025, up from 6.1 billion in 2024 and 5.1 billion in 2023, with flaring depth rising as effectively.

In April, the NUPRC acknowledged “technical and infrastructural gaps” in emissions monitoring, pushing the deadline for standardized, high-level measurement techniques out to 2026 and 2027.

When requested about operator progress, NUPRC spokesperson Eniola Akinkuotu instructed Pluboard that oil firms have complied with disclosure guidelines. “It is a regulatory requirement, and all companies have to abide,” he stated. The fee didn’t instantly affirm concrete progress on the brand new measurement plans.

But how oil firms have complied with methane and flaring guidelines is telling. When oil large Shell announced in 2025 that it had eradicated routine flaring and saved methane depth beneath 0.2 p.c, the achievement relied closely on accounting.

Between 2016 and 2023, greater than 60 p.c of Shell’s reported emissions reductions got here not from cleansing up its operations, however from promoting off its onshore Nigerian belongings.

Before shedding these fields, Shell acknowledged in its 2024 Energy Transition Strategy report that roughly half of its complete international flaring occurred in Nigeria.

When oil majors divest, the air pollution merely adjustments palms. Satellite analysis by SkyTruth, utilizing knowledge from the Colorado School of Mines, revealed that in Oil Mining Lease (OML) 17, flaring surged sevenfold between 2020 and 2024 following its sale.

At the Oyigbo discipline, fuel flaring expanded 15-fold over the identical interval. At Agbada, flaring doubled instantly post-sale; at Nkali, it almost quadrupled inside a 12 months.

Monitoring by the United Nations’ International Methane Emissions Observatory mirrors these findings. Of 21 confirmed Niger Delta methane hotspot clusters logged between May 2024 and May 2025, 12 had been positioned on belongings divested by AGIP to native agency Oando – with 9 hotspots concentrated in OML 61 alone.

As emissions improve, disclosure has not fared higher. When the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) carried out the nation’s first upstream greenhouse-gas audit in 2024, solely 15 of 62 working firms submitted knowledge.

Forty-seven companies claimed they’d no knowledge, and solely 20 confirmed having a written local weather coverage. Non-disclosing entities included main gamers reminiscent of Aiteo, Seplat, Oando, and Eni’s native subsidiary.

Although federal legislation permits NEITI to penalize non-compliant companies, no sanctions have been issued. “This poor compliance rate poses a significant risk to Nigeria’s ability to meet its national climate change commitments,” NEITI warned.

While NEITI positioned sector-wide reporting compliance at simply 24 per cent for 2024, the NUPRC reported 54 p.c. Akinkuotu famous that firms might not face no authorized obligation to share knowledge with NEITI, solely with the regulatory fee.

TotalEnergies commits globally to methane depth beneath 0.1% of business fuel produced. Neither of its two Nigerian upstream ventures appeared among the many 15 companies that disclosed to NEITI.

Chevron pledges to “keep methane in the pipe” and targets zero routine flaring by 2030. Its reported emissions then fell 99.8% in a single 12 months, from 173.6m kilogrammes to roughly 266,000, a drop NEITI stated wanted impartial verification.

Heirs Energies reported 217.4m kilogrammes of methane in 2023 after buying OML 17, among the many largest single-year figures in NEITI’s document — with no 2022 baseline for a mature asset.

Seplat, now Nigeria’s largest indigenous operator, says it “continues to closely monitor and reduce emissions” by means of “proper designs” and “prompt maintenance of scrubbers”. The firm stated it ended routine flaring in its onshore Western Assets in 2025: flare volumes there fell from 9% of produced fuel in 2024 to three% by the fourth quarter of 2025.

Its Eastern Assets – which embrace Ibeno – solely started that journey in early 2026. The firm says it “consistently complies with all applicable regulatory reporting and disclosure requirements”.

International disclosures just isn’t higher. Of 153 international power companies within the UN-backed Oil and Gas Methane Partnership, solely three are Nigerian. State-owned NNPC has by no means filed a disclosure, Chevron’s preliminary submission earned the bottom transparency rating, and never a single home upstream operator has joined.

For communities residing alongside these belongings, the regulatory vacuum carries a value.

Between January 2020 and May 2026, operators in Akwa Ibom State flared roughly 35.9 billion commonplace cubic toes of fuel, based on knowledge from the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency.

That represents $125.8 million in wasted gasoline, 1.9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted, and $71.9 million in accrued penalties – power that would have generated an estimated 3,600 gigawatt-hours of electrical energy.

On its web site, Network Exploration & Production states an goal to finish flaring by 2027 and goals to attain 50 per cent discount in carbon depth by 2030. Messages and calls in search of touch upon its progress went unanswered.

Meanwhile, health studies in Ibeno have recognized measurable reductions in lung operate, altered blood parameters, and impaired immune markers amongst residents uncovered to persistent flaring. A broader 2026 research throughout the Niger Delta linked flaring publicity to higher rates of childhood respiratory illness, cough, and poor dietary outcomes.

In Inua Eyet Ikot, the place the air stays heavy with warmth from the close by stack, Idiok Godwin has ceased anticipating authorities or company intervention.

“There is nothing we can do about it,” he stated. “We just keep managing.”

This report was supported by the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID).