Nigeria plans to almost double oil production and triple its refining capacity within six years, reviving previous pledges that turned out to be too ambitious.

The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries member is looking to pump four-million barrels a day by 2025 and increase refining capacity to 1.5-million barrels daily, Maikanti Baru, MD of State-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corp (NNPC), said at a conference last month in the capital, Abuja. “Nigeria needs to unlock new barrels as quickly as possible,” he said.

Africa’s biggest oil producer pumps 2.2- million barrels a day and previously set a four- million target for 2010, before successively delaying it. The country, where output peaked near 2.5-million barrels a day in the middle of the last decade, has grappled with militant attacks, leakages and theft at its oil installations.

“Targets such as these are not new to the NNPC,” said Cheta Nwanze, an analyst at Lagos-based SBM Intelligence. “Nigeria has not met a single production target for at least a decade now, in many cases because of security concerns.”

Nigeria also wants to be self-reliant in meeting its fuel demand and cut imports, which puts a strain on foreign reserves. Oil Minister Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu told the BBC in 2017 that he would step down if the country did not achieve that goal by the end of this year. The target is likely to be missed, as the four State-owned refineries struggle to fully use their combined 445 000-bl/d capacity, following years of neglect and mismanagement.

Baru said part of the additional refining would come from a 650 000-bl/d complex being built near Lagos by Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest person.

“The desperate need for an improvement in local refining capacity has been obvious for decades,” Nwanze said. The 2025 plan was “extremely optimistic”.

The NNPC, which pumps crude from the country’s fields in partnership with international companies returned to profit in 2018, after reporting losses in at least the three previous years, according to its website.