FG to Return 13 Unbid Oil Blocks to Licensing Pool After 2025 Round Draws 143 Firms

The Federal Government has disclosed that 13 of the 50 oil and gas blocks offered under the 2025 Licensing Round will be returned to the national licensing pool after failing to attract any bids from investors, even as officials described overall interest in the exercise as encouraging.

The disclosure was made on Tuesday in Abuja by the Chief Executive of the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC), Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, during the ongoing 2025 Commercial Bid Conference, where commercial bids submitted by qualified companies were being opened and reviewed.

According to Eyesan, while the licensing round initially placed 50 oil and gas blocks on offer across the country's various sedimentary basins, only 37 of those blocks ultimately attracted interest from prospective investors. The remaining 13 blocks, she explained, recorded no representations and will now be returned to the licensing basket for consideration in future bid rounds.

Despite the unbid assets, Eyesan struck an optimistic tone about the broader outcome of the exercise, noting that a total of 143 companies participated in the commercial bidding process, collectively submitting around 200 bids for the available blocks. She said this level of participation reflected strong and growing investor confidence in Nigeria's upstream petroleum sector, even as some blocks failed to draw bidders.

She further disclosed that the licensing round had initially generated interest from close to 300 companies at the earliest stage of the process. That number, however, narrowed significantly as the exercise progressed through its various evaluation stages. Following the prequalification stage, the pool of interested companies was reduced to 196, before further technical and commercial evaluation processes brought the number of active participants down to the 143 firms that eventually took part in the commercial bidding exercise.

The 2025 Licensing Round, which forms the backdrop to this development, was first announced by the NUPRC in November 2025 under the provisions of the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) 2021. It covered a wide spread of assets across seven sedimentary basins, comprising 16 onshore blocks located in the Niger Delta, 18 shallow-water blocks, a single deep offshore block, three blocks within the Benin Basin, four blocks in the Anambra Basin, four in the Chad Basin, and four more in the Benue Trough.

Since its launch, the licensing process has moved through several defined stages. It began with the opening of the application portal in December 2025, followed by a pre-bid conference held in Lagos in January 2026. Registration and prequalification for interested companies closed in February, with the technical evaluation process completed by March, paving the way for the commercial bidding stage now underway in Abuja.

Under the framework guiding the licensing round, successful bidders are selected through a weighted assessment that takes into account several key factors, including a company's signature bonus commitments, proposed work programmes, technical competence, financial capacity, and performance guarantees. The objective of this structured evaluation process, according to regulatory officials, is to ensure that oil and gas assets are awarded strictly to investors capable of accelerating exploration and production activities in the country, rather than to speculative bidders without the capacity to develop the blocks.

With 13 blocks now set to return to the national licensing pool, attention will likely turn to how the Federal Government intends to reposition these unbid assets, whether through inclusion in the newly approved 2026 licensing round or through adjustments to the terms guiding future bid exercises, as the government continues its push to attract sustained investment into Nigeria's upstream petroleum sector.