Nigeria’s Oil Recovery: A War Room, Some Luck, and a Dash of Ambition

Nigeria, long the wildcard of OPEC, has cranked up its oil production to a respectable 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd), claiming on Thursday that it could hit 2 million bpd by year-end—not even two months away. That’s a bold promise, especially for a country that barely scraped together 1.3 million bpd just last month, according to the direct communication figure in OPEC’s October Monthly Oil Market Report.

Of course, Nigeria could very well be sneaking in hundreds of thousands of barrels of condensate when throwing around that…