Oando targets $750m to triple output as Iran war redirects West African energy appetite

Oando, one of Nigeria’s largest indigenous oil and gas companies, is racing to lock down up to $750 million this year to fund an aggressive drilling campaign that chief executive Wale Tinubu says could push production up by as much as 300 per cent, and the timing, he argues, could not be better.

A volatile geopolitical landscape, shaped by the Iran war and its knock-on effects on global energy supply chains, has redrawn the map of investor interest in hydrocarbon producers. West Africa, long dismissed as a high-risk frontier by European capital markets, is now looking decidedly more attractive by comparison.

“We are pushing very, very hard towards getting the financing that we need to do an extensive drilling campaign,” Tinubu told Reuters. “Africa is very, very peaceful compared to these regions.”

Oando averaged just over 32,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in its 2025 fiscal year. The company aims to drill as many as 100 new wells, targeting in particular assets it acquired from Western majors ConocoPhillips and Italian energy group Eni, part of a broader decade-long wave of divestments by international oil companies from Nigerian onshore acreage. Oando is among a handful of local operators that have stepped into the gap left by those exits.

Over the past decade, Oando raised between $3 billion and $4 billion, the bulk of it through European banks, with most of those funds directed at acquisitions rather than drilling.

That pipeline of European capital has since dried up almost entirely, as lenders on the continent retreated from African hydrocarbons in response to growing pressure over climate commitments.

The resulting gap has pushed Oando towards a more diversified funding base: the African Export-Import Bank, the African Finance Corporation, and major commodity trading houses including Vitol, Trafigura, Glencore and Mercuria. But Tinubu is candid that the continent still lacks the depth of capital required for large-scale upstream development.

“Africa needed more substantial long-term funding,” he said. Gulf-based banks, however, are filling some of that void, with more institutions joining syndications for African energy projects. Private equity funds and hedge funds are also increasingly active in the space, according to Tinubu.

He also made the case for mobilising domestic capital, through pension funds and other local savings pools, to fund major infrastructure and energy projects across the continent. Oando recently extended its footprint into Angola and is actively evaluating opportunities in Ghana and Ivory Coast.

Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer, with combined crude and condensate output of approximately 1.6 million barrels per day. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, triggered by the Iran war, has already begun to redirect global crude flows, with more Nigerian cargoes heading to Asian markets to replace Gulf oil now trapped behind the chokepoint.

Tinubu does not expect the strategic calculus to reverse even if a ceasefire holds. “Even if the ceasefire lasts, which, hopefully it will, it wouldn’t change the fact that consistently, you’re going to find disruptions,” he said. The geopolitical turbulence, in his view, will keep the spotlight on West Africa’s hydrocarbon reserves for years to come.