INVESTIGATION: NUPRC fails to enforce Nigeria’s anti-flaring law as methane emissions go unchecked (2)

This is the second and final part of this investigation. Read the first part here.

When Nigeria enacted the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) in August 2021, it sought to close one of the country’s longest-running environmental failures and reduce methane among other emissions.

For decades, governments had promised to end gas flaring and reduce other means of methane emission.

The PIA, rather than relying solely on penalties, created a legal framework for planning, commercialisation and regulatory enforcement.

Key among the requirements was that every producer of natural gas had to prepare a Natural Gas Flare Elimination and Monetisation Plan (FEMP) showing exactly how it intended to end gas flaring.

The law also empowered the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) to seize flare gas and allocate it to investors capable of converting it into useful products such as electricity, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), compressed natural gas (CNG) and fertiliser.

Nearly five years after the Act came into force, PREMIUM TIMES found that implementation has fallen far short of the law’s ambition.

This investigation examined whether NUPRC, the regulator responsible for enforcing Nigeria’s anti-flaring laws and reducing methane emissions, has fulfilled its legal obligations.

The findings indicate that the biggest obstacle to ending gas flaring and reducing methane emissions is the failure to implement that legislation.

Deadline the regulator failed to meet

Section 108 of the PIA provides that every licensee or lessee producing natural gas shall, within 12 months of the Act’s effective date, submit a Natural Gas Flare Elimination and Monetisation Plan prepared in accordance with regulations issued by the NUPRC.

The law commenced in August 2021. Meaning, under the Act, operators had until August 2022 to submit the plan. However, the regulations required to guide the preparation of those plans did not yet exist.

The NUPRC only signed the Gas Flaring, Venting and Methane Emissions (Prevention of Waste and Pollution) Regulations in May 2023, almost two years after the PIA became law.

The regulations were later gazetted in July 2023 and by then, the statutory twelve-month period contained in the Act had already expired by 11 months.

Rather than implement the timeline contained in the Act, Section 3(2) of the regulation introduced a fresh deadline, giving companies six months from the commencement of the regulation to submit their FEMP.

With the new deadline, the NUPRC effectively reset the clock outside the August 2022 deadline provided in the Act. That sequence raises a key legal question. Can a regulation issued by an agency effectively extend a timeline already fixed by an Act of the National Assembly?

To understand the implications, PREMIUM TIMES sought the opinion of an Akwa Ibom-based legal practitioner, Ekemini Udim.

He said the NUPRC’s delay fundamentally weakened the law’s implementation. “It is disturbing that a provision of an Act of the National Assembly could be frustrated in this manner,” he said.

“The Act clearly envisaged that regulations would already exist before the deadline for submitting FEMP.”

According to him, the responsibility rested squarely with the regulator. “The companies can legitimately argue that they were waiting for the commission to issue the regulations required by the Act. If the commission had acted promptly, companies would have had no excuse.”

Mr Udim said the failure should, therefore, be viewed primarily as a regulatory failure rather than a corporate one.

“It is the commission that failed to put the legal machinery in place within the timeline established by Parliament.”

Mr Udim’s interpretation raises uncomfortable questions. If the regulator itself failed to comply with the implementation timetable created by the PIA, can it effectively sanction companies for delays that flowed partly from its own inaction?

On 28 July, PREMIUM TIMES sent a detailed media enquiry to the Head of Media and Strategic Communications of NUPRC, Eniola Akinkuotu, asking the commission to explain why the regulations were issued almost two years after the PIA came into force and whether the delay contributed to non-compliance by operators.

The commission acknowledged receipt of the enquiry. When reminded on 4 August, its spokesperson said the questions had been forwarded to the relevant departments and that responses were still being compiled.

No substantive response has been received as of the time of this report.

Four years passed before NUPRC acted

Long before the first permit was issued under the revived Nigerian Gas Flare Commercialisation Programme (NGFCP), the PIA had already handed the NUPRC powers over flare gas.

Section 105(2) of the Act provides that the commission “shall have the right to take, free of charge, natural gas that is destined to be flared at the flare stack.”

Instead of allowing operators to continue burning associated gas into the atmosphere, the law authorises the regulator to take ownership of that gas and allocate it to third-party investors capable of converting it into electricity, cooking gas, CNG, fertiliser and other industrial products.

The legal mechanism is intended to achieve the objectives of eliminating gas flaring and unlocking economic value from a resource that had for decades gone up in flames.

The 2023 Gas Flaring, Venting and Methane Emissions Regulations reinforced the provisions by setting out the operational framework through which the commission could exercise them.

Yet PREMIUM TIMES reported that the NUPRC only issued flare-gas permits in December 2025 to 28 companies, more than four years after the PIA became law.

During that period, millions of standard cubic feet of associated gas continued to burn daily, and improperly combusted gas continued to emit methane across the Niger Delta’s oil fields.

PREMIUM TIMES, in its media enquiry on 28 July, among other questions to NUPRC, requested the flare sites allocated to each of the 28 companies, the operators associated with those sites and the dates each permit became effective.

The newspaper also requested data showing how much flare gas had been captured and commercialised between the issuance of the permits and 30 June 2026. NUPRC did not provide this data. Checks on each of the 28 companies with a functional website did not yield this data.

However, the NUPRC’s latest threat on 8 September to revoke permits for gas flare site awards over non-utilisation suggests that the law to take gas destined for flaring may not have yielded the desired result four years after it was passed. PREMIUM TIMES reported that the commission has said it will revoke permits where investors fail to demonstrate significant progress in utilising the gas flare sites.

Regulation to publish vented gas data fails in compliance

The PIA and the 2023 regulations issued by NUPRC moved beyond just regulating operators. They also imposed obligations on the commission itself.

Section 23 of the Gas Flaring, Venting and Methane Emissions (Prevention of Waste and Pollution) Regulations requires the commission to prepare and publish an annual report detailing the implementation of the regulations.

Among the mandatory contents is comprehensive information on gas flaring and venting by producers, including the total volume of disposed gas, disaggregated into flared gas and vented gas, expressed as a percentage of natural gas produced.

The report is to be published not later than 30 June each year for the preceding calendar year.

PREMIUM TIMES reviewed the commission’s 2023 and 2024 Annual Financial and Operational Performance Reports. Although both reports contain extensive information on gas flaring, they do not publish data on gas venting.

Unlike flaring, where methane is at least partially combusted, venting involves the direct release of natural gas into the atmosphere. Scientific studies indicate that venting is the largest source of methane emissions from upstream oil and gas operations.

Beyond not publishing venting data, the publication is not timely. Contrary to the 30 June deadline, as of 27 August 2026, NUPRC had not published its report covering 2025, missing the statutory deadline by more than a month.

PREMIUM TIMES asked the commission why the publication deadline had been missed and why venting data required under the regulations had not been disclosed. The commission said it would provide responses in due course.

The delay means the public cannot independently assess the country’s methane performance through venting for the most recent reporting year, despite regulations requiring annual disclosure.

The reporting gaps on the part of NUPRC also leave unanswered a central question at the heart of Nigeria’s climate commitments: If methane emissions are not comprehensively and timely reported, how can progress toward reducing them be measured?

Methane: The emissions Nigeria still struggles to measure

If gas flaring is the most visible symbol of pollution and toxic emissions from Nigeria’s oil industry, methane is its least visible and most dangerous.

Unlike flare stacks that illuminate the night sky, methane escapes silently.

It leaks from valves, compressors, pipelines and storage facilities. This is referred to in the industry as fugitive emissions. It is also released through venting during maintenance and operational activities. It also escapes through incomplete flaring, which happens during inefficient combustion when flare stacks fail to burn associated gas efficiently.

Scientists consider methane one of the most powerful greenhouse gases responsible for accelerating climate change.

Over a 20-year period, methane traps more than 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide, making even relatively small releases substantial from a climate perspective.

Recognising that threat, Nigeria positioned itself among African countries seeking to reduce methane emissions.

The country signed the Global Methane Pledge, committed to eliminating routine gas flaring, and incorporated ambitious methane-reduction targets into its Nationally Determined Contributions submitted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Nigeria, which currently leads Africa in methane pollution, accounting for 16 per cent of total sub-Saharan African methane emissions from the oil and gas sector between 2010 and 2020, aims to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by 60 per cent between 2031 and 2035 and cut fugitive methane emissions by 95 per cent by 2050.

Those commitments were the basis for the Guidelines for the Management of Methane and Greenhouse Gases in the Upstream Oil and Gas Sector, issued by NUPRC in 2022.

The following year, the commission strengthened those requirements through the Gas Flaring, Venting and Methane Emissions (Prevention of Waste and Pollution) Regulations.

The regulations require operators to establish methane inventories, implement Leak Detection and Repair (LDAR) programmes, maintain Fugitive Methane Emission Data (FMED), submit Greenhouse Gas Emission Management Plans, keep daily flaring and venting records and progressively eliminate routine flaring.

However, implementing this demand has been a challenge that NUPRC has publicly acknowledged. In an official directive issued on 11 April 2026, NUPRC acknowledged that implementing Nigeria’s methane guidelines had encountered significant obstacles.

The commission cited what it described as “technical capacity limitations and infrastructural Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) gaps” among operators.

MRV systems are the backbone of greenhouse gas regulation. Without accurate measurement, reporting and verification, regulators cannot determine whether companies are reducing emissions or merely estimating them.

The commission admitted that these deficiencies had affected implementation of the methane guidelines.

To address the problem, it directed operators to adopt standardised reporting templates for Greenhouse Gas Emissions Management Plans and greenhouse gas inventories.

It further instructed companies to begin reporting emissions using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Tier 2 methodology starting in the third quarter of 2026 before transitioning to the more accurate, measurement-based Tier 3 methodology by January 2027.

This acknowledgement means that nearly three years after the methane regulations came into force, Nigeria is still working to establish the systems required to measure emissions accurately. This points to the fact that currently available methane data remains based on engineering estimates rather than direct field measurements.

The Programme Lead for Energy, Extractive and Climate Justice of Policy Alert,  Edidiong Dickson, says that limitation complicates efforts to evaluate whether Nigeria is genuinely reducing methane emissions.

When reporting becomes voluntary

The commission’s own annual reports also reveal challenges in obtaining environmental information from operators.

In its 2024 Annual Financial and Operational Performance Report, NUPRC identified among its principal constraints: delayed submission of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Management Plans; failure by operators to submit greenhouse gas inventories; inadequate technical capacity for methane leak detection; and shortages of specialised greenhouse gas service providers.

Those findings align with the experience of PREMIUM TIMES during this investigation.

Frontier Oil admitted that it had not submitted Fugitive Methane Emission Data to the commission despite the regulatory requirement and that no sanction followed. The failure of Sterling Oil, Aradel Holding, and Heirs Energy to respond to PREMIUM TIMES’ enquiries raises suspicion of non-compliance.

The NUPRC itself has neither publicly disclosed the names of companies that failed to submit mandatory methane reports nor published records showing enforcement actions taken against defaulting operators.

That lack of transparency makes it difficult to assess whether environmental obligations are being applied consistently across the industry.

From environmental penalty to government revenue

If implementation gaps represent one challenge, another concerns what happens after companies flare and vent gas.

The PIA treats gas flaring and venting as an offence.

Section 104 provides that operators who flare or vent natural gas are liable to pay prescribed penalties.

But the Act went further than previous regulations by recognising that host communities bear the environmental brunt of gas flaring and venting. Section 104(4) provides that gas-flaring penalties should be applied toward environmental remediation and relief for the host communities where gas is flared.

However, that arrangement changed earlier this year when, in February 2026, President Bola Tinubu issued an Executive Order directing that gas-flaring penalties be paid into the Federation Account.

The federal government argued that retaining the money outside the Federation Account reduced revenues available for national distribution.

According to an environmental expert and Executive Director of the Peoples Empowerment and Ecosystem Restoration Foundation, Mfon Gabriel, “that decision reclassified gas-flaring penalties as part of government revenue, making companies see flaring no longer as an offence but as a means to contribute to government revenue.

“If government begins to see gas-flaring penalties primarily as revenue, there is a legitimate concern that eliminating gas flaring becomes financially less attractive, leading to more emissions while the host communities and the environment are sacrificed.”

According to NUPRC’s 2024 operational report reviewed by PREMIUM TIMES, although N700.75 billion had been remitted as gas flare penalties between 2021 and 2024, liabilities arising from gas flaring exceeded $936 million.

The figures in liabilities raise another accountability question.

Section 104 (2) of the PIA provides that penalties are to be paid in the same manner as royalties.

In Nigeria, operators must pay royalties monthly after the month of production.

The continued existence of hundreds of millions of dollars in outstanding liabilities raises questions beyond collection, enforcement and recovery. It throws into question whether flaring and venting are still seen as punishment for pollution, given that the penalties are sometimes allowed to be paid at convenience, hence the liabilities.

For environmental advocate and Coordinator of Peace Point Development Foundation, Umo Isua-Ikoh, the bigger issue is that “Government should not become comfortable collecting penalties while flaring continues.”

“The objective should always be to eliminate gas flaring, venting and fugitive emissions, thereby reducing methane emissions so that our planet won’t be thrown into a climate crisis from which humans, especially the global south, are unable to recover due to global warming”.

Regardless, the findings of this investigation expose clear gaps in the enforcement of the PIA and other supporting regulations.

Despite the legal architecture, in community after community visited during this investigation, residents judged those laws by their lived reality.

Those experiences revealed that climate governance is measured by whether regulations issued change conditions on the ground and contribute to reducing the climate change plaguing communities.

This is the second and final part of this investigation. Read the first part here.

This story is supported by the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID).