Africa’s upstream oil and gas investment fell to $37 billion in 2025 from $68 billion in 2016, with Algeria, Angola, Egypt, Nigeria and Libya together accounting for 70% of investment and 80% of production on the continent, according to the International Energy Agency’s 2026 World Energy Investment report.

The IEA said combined investment across those five producers has roughly halved, from $50 billion in 2016 to $25 billion in 2025, despite a rise in Libya, reflecting broader shifts in investment competitiveness across the continent’s established oil and gas markets. Exploration spending held up better, reaching almost $6.5 billion in 2025 on the back of continued activity around recent discoveries, even though the global commercial success rate for exploration wells sits at only around 27%.

National oil companies accounted for roughly a quarter of total upstream capital spending, with private and international oil companies still driving most investment, technology and project execution capacity. The IEA said partnerships and alternative financing arrangements, of the kind seen in Mozambique and Senegal, are becoming more important as government budgets in some producer countries constrain how much national oil companies can spend on their own.

Nigeria has pointed to its own reforms as a bright spot, with the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission saying changes anchored on the 2021 Petroleum Industry Act have unlocked more than $10 billion in upstream investment, supporting streamlined licensing and projects including Bonga North, Ubeta and the HI development. NUPRC also confirmed 31 companies recently emerged as winners of 37 blocks under Nigeria’s 2025 licensing round, while the country’s crude oil production climbed about 40.5% to 1.84 million barrels a day by April, after dipping to 1.31 million barrels a day in February.

Source: nairametrics.com