Companies · AMNI International

TotalEnergies and an indigenous driller finally sanctioned the gas field Nigeria found in 1973

At the Transcorp Hilton in Abuja on Wednesday, September 23, Tunde Afolabi signed off on a gas field older than most of the executives standing beside him.

$800 million. Ima. Wednesday.

The field was discovered in 1973, by a rig belonging to Japan Petroleum. That year, Afolabi was leaving Nigeria for Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania to study geology. He wouldn't touch the field for another two decades.

The Final Investment Decision signed this week commits that $800 million to a project that has waited 53 years to exist. Located across Oil Mining Leases 112 and 117, eight kilometres off Bonny Island, Ima will produce 350 million standard cubic feet of gas a day once it's running, feeding roughly a third of what Nigeria LNG needs for its Train 7 expansion. First gas is targeted for the end of 2028.

None of that happened on Wednesday. What happened on Wednesday was the end of a long wait.

Afolabi founded AMNI International in Lagos in 1993, the year Nigeria first began awarding oil blocks to indigenous companies. He picked up the Ima licence, then called OPL 469, on a sole-risk basis, and partnered with Liberty Technical Services to develop it. Appraisal drilling started the following year. By 1996, AMNI had oil flowing.

The licence converted to OML 112 in 1997-98, for a 20-year term. AMNI kept working the block alone for another seven years. In 2005, Elf Petroleum Nigeria Limited, Total's Nigerian subsidiary, signed a farm-in agreement for a 40 percent working interest in both OMLs, while AMNI kept the majority stake and TotalEnergies took over as operator. A year later, the Ima-12 appraisal well confirmed more than 1.6 trillion cubic feet of gas sitting under the same acreage that had already produced the company's oil.

That confirmation sat on the books for eighteen years.

The reason, as far as the record shows, wasn't a mystery so much as arithmetic. For five decades, developing Ima meant working against a fiscal regime built for crude, not shallow-water gas, and extraction costs that made the project hard to justify against other priorities. What changed the calculus was a set of fiscal incentives Nigeria introduced specifically for non-associated gas developments, the kind of reform TotalEnergies has since linked directly to a run of gas projects reaching FID, Ubeta in 2024, now Ima. In May 2024, AMNI and TotalEnergies signed Heads of Terms in Houston, the kind of agreement that commits two companies to a deal before the lawyers finish the rest of it. Afolabi said this week's FID "fulfilled a commitment made when the two companies signed Heads of Terms in Houston in May 2024." He called it proof of "the value of trust and partnership between an indigenous Nigerian company and an international energy major."

The money behind the FID is mostly Nigerian. Zenith Bank, Access Bank, UBA, GTCO, Standard Bank, Standard Chartered and First Abu Dhabi Bank are financing the project, with Nigerian institutions arranging roughly 77 percent of the total. TotalEnergies has put its own share at more than $600 million. The investment is underpinned by a long-term gas sales agreement with NLNG, in which TotalEnergies separately holds a 15 percent stake, and Afolabi has said that commercial certainty was what made the capital possible to raise at all. TotalEnergies' Ima and Ubeta projects combined represent more than a billion dollars of investment across the two fields, though the $800 million FID announced this week belongs to Ima alone.

By the time Ima reached this point, AMNI wasn't just an Ima operator. The Okoro field, on the same OML 112, had been producing oil since 2008. The company had expanded into Ghana in 2014, taking a stake in a deep-water block called Central Tano. Afolabi, who'd gone from Franklin and Marshall to a master's at Tulane to a decade at Texaco and Mobil before founding AMNI, was by 2026 a forty-year veteran of an industry he'd entered as a geology student the same year Ima was discovered.

President Bola Tinubu welcomed the FID in a statement, calling it evidence of what his administration's reforms had unlocked. "For more than 50 years, the gas beneath Ima remained a resource with enormous potential, but potential alone does not create jobs, finance businesses or improve the lives of our people," he said.

What the room in Abuja actually signed was narrower than that framing. A field found in 1973, confirmed commercial in 2006, and committed to development in a Houston meeting room in 2024, finally has a start date, because the fiscal terms that made it uneconomic for eighteen years finally changed.

Ima doesn't produce gas yet. It has a deadline now, backed by seven banks and a long-term buyer. For a field that outlasted decades of nothing happening, that's the actual news.