Niger and Indonesia are negotiating a partnership to boost oil exploration and production across Niger’s hydrocarbon-rich basins. The deal could be one of the more significant energy agreements the landlocked Sahelian nation has signed outside its long-standing relationship with China, and comes at a time when both countries are actively looking to reshape their energy positions.
The alliance centers on technical collaboration, investment commitments, and the potential participation of Indonesia’s state-owned energy company PT Pertamina. For Niger, it is another step toward diversifying foreign partnerships and gaining greater control over its natural resources. For Indonesia, it continues Pertamina’s push to expand upstream operations across Africa — a strategy the company has pursued across more than a dozen countries, including Algeria, Angola, Gabon, and Niger itself. Analysts say the partnership reflects complementary interests: one country looking to attract a broader range of investors, the other looking to secure new sources of production abroad.
A partnership built on mutual necessity
Pertamina’s interest in Niger is not new. The Jakarta-based company already holds, or has held, upstream assets in the country, suggesting the current negotiations are building on an existing foundation rather than starting from scratch. What appears to be changing is the scale of ambition on both sides.
Niger’s military government, which came to power following a coup in July 2023, has made resource sovereignty a central economic priority. This was formalised in Ordinance No. 2024-34, which stated that “national wealth goes primarily to the benefit of Nigeriens” — a policy direction that has had direct implications for every foreign energy company operating in the country.
The government has also grown increasingly critical of its arrangement with the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), which controls the Agadem oilfield and the 1,950-kilometer Niger-Benin export pipeline completed in 2024. Of the 90,000 barrels exported daily, Niger receives only 25.4% of production, with CNPC controlling the remaining 74.6%. A newly established oil negotiation committee has been tasked with addressing that imbalance and pushing for more favorable terms across existing and future agreements.
Indonesia enters these discussions from a position of domestic pressure. Pertamina’s reserves at home are declining, and at current production rates, without further discoveries, the company could exhaust its oil reserves by 2034. That timeline makes securing productive overseas acreage a strategic necessity rather than simply an expansion opportunity. Niger, with approximately 3.7 billion barrels in declared reserves and large areas of unexplored acreage, offers exactly the kind of upstream opportunity Pertamina’s international division has been seeking. Indonesia has also been broadening its international energy collaborations as part of efforts to meet longer-term production targets, and deploying Pertamina into frontier African markets fits within that wider strategy.
Ambitions, locations, and timelines
Niger currently has 35 oil blocks available for investment in addition to one already in production and nine under exploration. The government has set a target of increasing output from the current 110,000 barrels per day to 200,000 by the end of this year, and further to 500,000 by 2030. The Indonesian partnership is expected to contribute meaningfully to that growth trajectory.
NJ Ayuk, Executive Chairman of the African Energy Chamber, has noted that “Niger has significant potential to become a major crude exporter,” adding that unlocking that potential will require substantial investment in the upstream sector. The gap between Niger’s current output and its stated targets is considerable, and closing it will depend on attracting multiple credible investors, of which Indonesia would be one.
The specific exploration zones under discussion have not been publicly confirmed in full. However, Niger’s existing activity and investment promotion efforts point to several likely areas of focus.
The Agadem Rift Basin in the southeastern Diffa region remains the country’s most developed petroleum zone and the anchor of its export operations. Beyond Agadem, state-owned SONIDEP has begun prospecting on blocks in Bilma in the northeast and on several R-series blocks in the east, signaling that frontier areas are increasingly open for broader collaboration. Further north, the Kafra block has drawn international attention, with preliminary estimates suggesting reserves above 260 million barrels and potential production capacity of around 90,000 barrels per day — figures that, if confirmed, would add meaningfully to Niger’s overall production profile.
On timelines, frontier environments typically take five to seven years from agreement to first production, and often longer where new infrastructure needs to be built. The 2030 target is explicitly ambitious and depends on multiple projects with different partners progressing at the same time without significant delays.
Economic gains and local benefit
Niger’s recent shift in posture toward foreign investors has been notable. In April 2024, Prime Minister Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine praised CNPC at a $400 million signing ceremony, describing China as “a great friend to Niger.” Less than a year later, Chinese oil executives were being expelled, and sovereignty decrees had been issued by the same administration. The reversal reflects how quickly Niamey’s priorities moved once the government decided diversification was a practical necessity rather than a long-term goal.
Attracting more partners also strengthens Niger’s hand with its existing ones. The Niger-Benin pipeline currently gives Niger its only direct access to global oil markets, which limits its room for maneuver with CNPC. As Niger brings in additional operators and builds new relationships, it gradually improves its negotiating position. Any incoming Indonesian-backed venture would enter a regulatory environment already requiring far greater local participation than what CNPC has provided.
Employment is one of the most politically sensitive aspects of any new oil deal in Niger. Currently, only around 30% of workers in the country’s oil operations are Nigerien nationals. The government has demanded that figure rise to 80%, alongside pay parity between local and expatriate employees — conditions that CNPC has struggled to comply with, and which any incoming operator would need to build into its operational model from day one.
Niger has also set a target for the oil sector to account for 12% of formal employment, a goal that goes beyond simply hiring more workers in the field. It will require structured investment in technical education, vocational training, and skills transfer over a sustained period. There are some regional precedents to draw on: Algeria’s Sonatrach has committed to training Nigerien engineers and technicians at Algerian refineries, a model of practical skills exchange that could inform what Niamey and Jakarta agree on in their own negotiations.
The proposed partnership also fits into a broader pattern of South-South energy diplomacy that has become more visible across the Sahel since 2023. Niger has been building new bilateral relationships with Algeria, Turkey, Russia, and now Indonesia, each one reducing its dependence on any single external actor. For Indonesia, deepening ties with a government overseeing one of West Africa’s more promising hydrocarbon frontiers is straightforward in commercial terms, particularly given the pressure Pertamina faces at home.
Security, regulatory, and environmental challenges
Niger presents real operational challenges that any incoming investor will need to plan around carefully. Militant activity in parts of the country has increased in recent years, with some key roads contested and infrastructure occasionally disrupted. Operators working in Niger’s southeastern or northern blocks will need to incorporate security costs and contingency planning into their project economics from the outset, rather than treating them as secondary considerations.
Regulatory conditions add a further layer of complexity. The military government has revised agreements by decree, demanding back taxes, equal pay, and local content commitments outside standard arbitration or mediation frameworks. This creates an unpredictable environment for companies making long-term investment decisions, and Indonesian firms will need to carefully assess how that risk is managed and allocated in any final agreement.
Environmental standards in Niger’s oil sector have historically lagged behind international norms. Communities located near exploration and production sites, particularly in the Diffa and Agadez regions, have seen relatively little benefit from the country’s oil revenues so far. Infrastructure investment, environmental monitoring, and community development have not been consistent features of Niger’s existing energy arrangements. Any new agreement that genuinely addresses these areas would represent a departure from precedent and would likely be a positive signal to other potential investors watching how the Indonesia deal takes shape.
The Niger-Indonesia oil partnership remains in negotiation. The intent to cooperate is clear, but the details — investment figures, block allocations, production-sharing terms, and implementation timelines — are still being worked out.
Niger wants investors willing to accept its current terms: employing local workers, investing in skills development, and agreeing to a more balanced division of revenues than its dominant existing arrangement provides. Indonesia wants productive upstream acreage that can support Pertamina’s output beyond the mid-2030s. Both sides have clear reasons to want an agreement.
If the terms can be settled and the operational challenges properly managed, the partnership has the potential to become a practical step in Niger’s effort to take greater ownership of its oil sector, and a useful expansion of Pertamina’s international portfolio at a time when the company needs it most.
