The fire at Inua Eyet Ikot does not go out. Day and night, a flare stack operated by Network Exploration & Production Nigeria casts an orange glow over this oil-rich community in Akwa Ibom State, radiating heat as it burns.
“That’s how the fire burns nonstop,” said Sunday Okon, a security guard stationed a kilometer from the stack. “It can be really hot here, and sometimes you feel the vibration.”
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Half a kilometer closer to the flame, Idiok Godwin, a local bricklayer, shares his experience. “We cannot use rainwater here, and some nights it can be very hot,” he said. “People get ill too.”
The problems they describe point to a contradiction at the heart of Nigeria’s oil and gas industry. Globally, Nigeria has cast itself increasingly as an environmental champion, drafting some of the continent’s strictest regulations on polluting gas emissions, and committing to eliminating gas flaring by 2030.
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On the ground, however, flaring is not reducing. Driven by weak regulatory enforcement and a corporate practice where oil majors remove emissions liabilities from their books after selling aging assets to local operators, the country is burning more gas today than it did three years ago.
At the centre of the flaring is methane, the principal component of associated gas released during crude oil production. While burning converts most of it into carbon dioxide, quantities of unburned methane escape through incomplete flaring, intentional venting, and leaking infrastructure.
Though short-lived in the atmosphere, methane is an environmental pollutant. It traps roughly 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
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Experts view methane reduction as the fastest way to slow global warming, a priority for Nigeria which generated 16 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa’s oil-and-gas methane emissions between 2010 and 2020, according to the Natural Resource Governance Institute.
On paper, Nigeria is serious about the reduction. In 2021, the government signed the Global Methane Pledge and enacted the Petroleum Industry Act, empowering the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) to oversee operators and seize gas slated for flaring. Nigeria became one of the methane pledge’s champions, alongside the EU, America, Canada, Germany and Japan.
Subsequent rules in 2022 and 2023 mandated leak repairs, rigorous emissions tracking, and annual public disclosures detailing flaring penalties. Nigeria’s climate plan – the updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) submitted in 2021 – promised a 60% cut in fugitive methane emissions from oil and gas by 2031, zero gas flaring by 2030 and economy-wide net-zero by 2060. An updated version of the plan pushed the 60% fugitive-emissions target to 2035.
Not much has changed in practice. World Bank data analyzed by Pluboard shows that after a decade of steady reductions, Nigeria’s flaring volumes reversed course. Operators flared 6.6 billion cubic meters of gas in 2025, up from 6.1 billion in 2024 and 5.1 billion in 2023, with flaring intensity rising as well.
In April, the NUPRC acknowledged “technical and infrastructural gaps” in emissions monitoring, pushing the deadline for standardized, high-level measurement systems out to 2026 and 2027.
When asked about operator progress, NUPRC spokesperson Eniola Akinkuotu told Pluboard that oil companies have complied with disclosure rules. “It is a regulatory requirement, and all companies have to abide,” he said. The commission did not immediately confirm concrete progress on the new measurement plans.
But how oil companies have complied with methane and flaring rules is telling. When oil giant Shell announced in 2025 that it had eliminated routine flaring and kept methane intensity below 0.2 percent, the achievement relied heavily on accounting.
Between 2016 and 2023, more than 60 percent of Shell’s reported emissions reductions came not from cleaning up its operations, but from selling off its onshore Nigerian assets.
Before shedding those fields, Shell acknowledged in its 2024 Energy Transition Strategy report that roughly half of its total global flaring occurred in Nigeria.
When oil majors divest, the pollution simply changes hands. Satellite analysis by SkyTruth, using data 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 field, gas flaring expanded 15-fold over the same period. At Agbada, flaring doubled immediately post-sale; at Nkali, it nearly quadrupled within a year.
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 were located on assets divested by AGIP to local firm Oando – with nine hotspots concentrated in OML 61 alone.
As emissions increase, disclosure has not fared better. When the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) conducted the nation’s first upstream greenhouse-gas audit in 2024, only 15 of 62 operating companies submitted data.
Forty-seven firms claimed they had no data, and only 20 confirmed having a written climate policy. Non-disclosing entities included major players such as Aiteo, Seplat, Oando, and Eni’s local subsidiary.
Although federal law allows NEITI to penalize non-compliant firms, 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 placed sector-wide reporting compliance at just 24 per cent for 2024, the NUPRC reported 54 percent. Akinkuotu noted that companies may not face no legal obligation to share data with NEITI, only with the regulatory commission.
TotalEnergies commits globally to methane intensity below 0.1% of commercial gas produced. Neither of its two Nigerian upstream ventures appeared among the 15 firms 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 year, from 173.6m kilogrammes to roughly 266,000, a drop NEITI said needed independent verification.
Heirs Energies reported 217.4m kilogrammes of methane in 2023 after acquiring OML 17, among the largest single-year figures in NEITI’s record — with no 2022 baseline for a mature asset.
Seplat, now Nigeria’s largest indigenous operator, says it “continues to closely monitor and reduce emissions” through “proper designs” and “prompt maintenance of scrubbers”. The company said it ended routine flaring in its onshore Western Assets in 2025: flare volumes there fell from 9% of produced gas in 2024 to 3% by the fourth quarter of 2025.
Its Eastern Assets – which include Ibeno – only began that journey in early 2026. The company says it “consistently complies with all applicable regulatory reporting and disclosure requirements”.
International disclosures is not better. Of 153 global energy firms in the UN-backed Oil and Gas Methane Partnership, only three are Nigerian. State-owned NNPC has never filed a disclosure, Chevron’s initial submission earned the lowest transparency ranking, and not a single domestic upstream operator has joined.
For communities living alongside these assets, the regulatory vacuum carries a cost.
Between January 2020 and May 2026, operators in Akwa Ibom State flared approximately 35.9 billion standard cubic feet of gas, according to data from the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency.
That represents $125.8 million in wasted fuel, 1.9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted, and $71.9 million in accrued penalties – energy that could have generated an estimated 3,600 gigawatt-hours of electricity.
On its website, Network Exploration & Production states an objective to end flaring by 2027 and aims to achieve 50 per cent reduction in carbon intensity by 2030. Messages and calls seeking comment on its progress went unanswered.
Meanwhile, health studies in Ibeno have identified measurable reductions in lung function, altered blood parameters, and impaired immune markers among residents exposed to persistent flaring. A broader 2026 study across the Niger Delta linked flaring exposure to higher rates of childhood respiratory illness, cough, and poor nutritional outcomes.
In Inua Eyet Ikot, where the air remains heavy with heat from the nearby stack, Idiok Godwin has ceased expecting government or corporate intervention.
“There is nothing we can do about it,” he said. “We just keep managing.”
This report was supported by the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID).
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