Oil exploration in Nigeria predates the country by six years. In 1903 the Imperial German government, hunting for fuel for its expanding navy, granted a survey concession to the Nigerian Bitumen Corporation, a Hamburg-registered prospecting company headed by the geologist John Bergheim. By 1908 NBC had moved a German-supplied rotary rig — the first ever shipped to West Africa — to the tar-sands country around Araromi, on the coast of present-day Ondo State, where bitumen seeped through the surface in pools the local Ilaje had used for caulking canoes for centuries.
Bergheim's team drilled fourteen wells between 1908 and 1914. They found heavy oil at shallow depth — exactly what the surface seeps had advertised — but no flowing commercial reservoir. Three things then killed the venture: the equipment was wrong (rotary rigs designed for Texan sandstone could not handle the soft Niger Delta clays), the geology was wrong (Araromi sits at the western edge of the petroleum basin; the giant fields lay 300km east in the Delta proper), and the politics turned wrong. When World War I broke out in August 1914 the British colonial government in Lagos seized the concession as enemy property, packed the German engineers onto a steamer at Forcados, and let the rigs rust where they stood. Bergheim himself, back in London for talks, died in a 1912 car crash before the seizure.
For twenty-three years after that, no one drilled for oil in Nigeria. The colonial government issued no new concessions, partly out of WWI debt to the Royal Dutch Shell group it would later favour, partly because the Geological Survey (founded 1919) concluded Nigerian petroleum was 'unlikely to be of commercial significance'. The 1914 Mineral Oils Ordinance, written explicitly to keep oil rights in 'British or British-allied' hands, ensured that when exploration resumed, it would resume on London's terms. The German first chapter — the rotary rigs at Araromi, the fourteen dry holes, the Hamburg geology reports filed in the Colonial Office and ignored — is the part of the story that gets erased every time a politician dates the Nigerian oil industry to Oloibiri.
It did not start at Oloibiri. It started at Araromi, with a Hamburg company drilling for the Kaiser, and it stopped because the wrong empire won the wrong war.
Figure 1
Nigerian crude oil production, 1958–2024 (million barrels per day)
From the first 5,100-barrel cargo out of Oloibiri in February 1958 to a 2.44 mbpd peak in 2005, then a long decline of theft, divestment and force majeure.
Figure 2
Refining capacity and utilisation, 1965–2024
Four state refineries were built; none ran consistently above 50% after 1995; by 2020 official utilisation was zero. Dangote 2024 doubled installed capacity overnight.