Peter Uzoho
American oil and gas giant, ExxonMobil has said the Final Investment Decision (FID) on its Owowo deepwater projects in Nigeria with an estimated cost of between $7 billion to $8 billion could be reached early next year.
S&P Global quoted ExxonMobil’s Vice President for Deepwater Offshore, Hunter Farris to have stated this, a development that makes 2026–2027 a critical window for front-end engineering, regulatory clearances, and alignment with the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) on field development planning, domestic value retention and environmental compliance.
ExxonMobil holds 27 per cent interest in the Owowo asset and is the operator, while Joint Venture partners include Chevron Nigeria Limited (27 per cent), TotalEnergies E&P Nigeria Limited (18 per cent), Nexen Petroleum Deepwater Nigeria Limited (18 per cent), and the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC) (10 per cent).
In mid-April 2026, ExxonMobil was sharpening its focus on developing major deepwater projects in the Niger Delta, with the Bosi field in Oil Mining Lease (OML) 133 and the Owowo project spanning OMLs 139 and 154) at the centre of its strategic ambitions.
The Bosi development, estimated to cost between $15 billion and $16 billion, is expected to utilise a new floating production, storage and offloading unit (FPSO), enabling high-rate production while minimising reliance on vulnerable onshore logistics and export routes.
Farris had during a meeting with the NUPRC in Abuja, last April, said the oil major was encouraged by Nigeria’s improved investment climate, hence its decision to “renew our vows to Nigeria”.
Specifically, Farris stated that the Production Sharing Contract (PSC) on Erha had been extended to 2042 and the company was doing a lot of life extension works to get the Erha FPSO back to maximum performance.
Besides Erha, he said ExxonMobil was gearing up for potential new investments on Usan, which entails “drilling a handful of wells”, as well as the Owowo deepwater project.
On the Owowo project, Farris also said, “There is about a billion barrels of developed resource, of between $7 billion and $8-billion-dollar project, that we are progressing, looking into an FID as early as next year.”
He also spoke on the Bosi oil and gas field adjacent to Erha, which he said had the potential of attracting fresh capital of between $15 billion and $16 billion if the company was to develop a new FPSO and new pipelines
Earlier in the the same April, Chairman and Managing Director of ExxonMobil Affiliate in Nigeria, Mr. Jagir Baxi had during an interview with THISDAY, spoke of some of the company’s upcoming investments and projects including Owowo and Bosi.
He revealed that the company was targeting growing its total oil production in Nigeria from the current 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 250,000bpd in the next five years.
As reported by THISDAY, ExxonMobil had in September 2024 during a meeting between its executives and Vice President Kashim Shettima in New York, United States, announced its decision to invest $10 billion in deep-water oil projects in Nigeria, expecting to unlock at least 180,000 barrels per day (bpd).
Central to that investment is the Owowo deep-water asset, which holds between 500 million and one billion oil reserves, and whose development requires a tie-back to the company’s nearby Usan FPSO facility.
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