Lost history · 1956–2024
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Every Nigerian schoolchild learns that oil was first struck at Oloibiri. In 2024 a court agreed that the first well actually stood on the land of a neighbouring village.
For fifty years, oil companies poked around Nigeria looking for oil and came up mostly empty. Then, on Sunday 15 January 1956, a company called Shell Darcy struck it in a swamp in the creeks of what is now Ogbia, Bayelsa State, about 45 miles east of Port Harcourt. Testing showed the well could flow about five thousand barrels a day. That was enough to call it a commercial find, the first in the country.
The field was named Oloibiri, after the small creek community it was linked to. That's normal practice in Nigeria, where oilfields usually take the name of a host community or a local landmark. In 1956 the area was also called the Oloibiri District, part of Brass Division. So the name stuck, and it went into every textbook. Say "first oil in Nigeria" and people answer "Oloibiri", almost by reflex.
The rush came quickly. That same year the company became Shell-BP. By 1958 it had found oil in twelve places in the Niger Delta. Engineers drilled more wells at Oloibiri and numbered them one by one. Shell laid the country's first crude oil pipeline from the field to Port Harcourt on the Bonny River, and in February 1958 Nigeria exported its first crude oil, at about 5,100 barrels a day.
It is worth knowing what came with it. The oil was heavy and sour. The gas that came up with it was simply burned off, because at the time nobody in the country had any way to process or use it. That flare, burning day and night over the creeks, became the image of everything that followed.
A few plain facts help you picture it. The discovery well, Oloibiri-1, had been spudded, which is the oilman's word for starting to drill, on 3 August 1955, more than five months before the oil showed. The company changed its name to Shell-BP on 30 April 1956, to reflect BP's share, and changed it again in 1979, to Shell Petroleum Development Company, after the government nationalised BP's interest. Of the twelve finds it had made by 1958, three looked best: Oloibiri, Afam and Bomu. The field itself is small, about 13.75 square kilometres of swamp inside the licence block called OML 29.
Oloibiri was not a giant field. Production peaked in 1964. Later wells drilled to squeeze out more, one in 1967 and another in 1979, came up disappointing or dry and were plugged and abandoned. Over about twenty years the field gave up just over twenty million barrels. Then, in 1978, production stopped and the field was abandoned. According to the figures, around 21 million barrels were still left in the ground, with no attempt made to recover them.
Twenty million barrels sounds huge until you remember that Nigeria's later fields made Oloibiri look tiny. The place that started it all ended up a footnote, and the communities around it say they were left with little to show for it. When young Ijaw people met at Kaiama in 1998, their declaration pointed to "the Oloibiri experience" as a warning of what oil does to a place once it runs out. For many people in the delta, Oloibiri had become a symbol of a resource taken away and a community forgotten.
There was a plan to make amends, at least symbolically: an Oloibiri Museum and Research Centre, to remember the start of Nigeria's oil story. And that plan opened a question nobody had settled. Where exactly did the first well stand?
The field, as it turned out, was spread over several communities. Reports on the case say the famous Oloibiri field was made up of 21 wells. They were drilled and numbered in order, beginning with the first discovery in January 1956, and that first well, together with many of the others, stood on the land of Otuabagi, a neighbouring Ogbia community. The field took the district's name, but the very first well sat in Otuabagi.
When the museum project was marked for Otuabagi, Oloibiri community went to court. Its case, suit OHC/10/2021, named a long list of defendants: the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Bayelsa State Government, the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board, Shell, and the communities of Otuabagi, Otuogidi and Opume. Oloibiri wanted the museum moved.
The Ijaw National Congress stepped in to mediate. The parties reached a settlement, and in March 2024 Justice Simon Amaduobogha of the Bayelsa State High Court entered it as a consent judgment. It named Otuabagi as the host community of the well that first produced oil in commercial quantity in 1956. It ordered that the museum and research centre be sited in Otuabagi, describing it as the birthplace of the discovery. And it told Oloibiri community to stop demanding that the project move, since it could only go where the artefacts, including the first oil well, actually are. Because it was a consent judgment, it cannot be appealed. The judge said it put to rest a long-standing misconception.
The numbers behind that first well are worth a moment. After the discovery, Shell drilled 11 appraisal wells between June 1956 and October 1958 to see how far the oil ran, and six of them struck it. Four more development wells followed in 1958, and together they gave the field eleven producing wells. When oil first flowed for sale, it came at about 4,928 barrels a day, and it averaged around 5,100 a day in the first year. The gas that came up with it was simply burned off, because the country had nowhere to use it. Later attempts to squeeze more from the field failed. A well drilled in 1967 disappointed and was plugged, and another in 1979 came up dry.
So the textbooks were both right and wrong. The oilfield is Oloibiri, and the name will probably never change. But the first well, the one that drew Nigeria into the oil age, sits on Otuabagi land, and the court has now said so. Next time someone says "Oloibiri", you can tell them about Otuabagi.
