Table of contents
Nigeria's crude oil production has climbed to 1.75 million barrels per day, with a national target of 2.5 million by the end of 2026. Senegal's Sangomar field is producing ahead of initial estimates. The Greater Tortue Ahmeyim LNG project is exporting. Yakaar-Teranga is in active development. Renaissance Africa Energy, following its acquisition of Shell's onshore portfolio, is now one of the largest operators of onshore oil assets on the continent. These are not background developments. This is Africa building something significant, at speed, and largely on its own terms for the first time.
In the past few weeks at SøDera, I have been in conversations with people at the heart of this. CEOs of Nigerian and Senegalese energy companies. Asset integrity managers. Project directors. Operations leads. People who are, right now, making decisions that will shape how these assets are managed for the next 30 years.
What I keep finding is the same gap, in almost every conversation.
What the Gap Actually Looks Like
Imagine an energy company managing significant assets, with engineering teams, operational sites and regulatory obligations, making the decision to move to Microsoft 365. Good decision. The right direction. Except the migration starts without a prior assessment of what their existing data actually looks like, what structure they need before anything moves, or whether the information they hold is fit to be migrated at all. What happens is a very capable platform lands on top of a foundation that was never examined. The chaos does not disappear. It just gets a new address.
That scenario is not unusual. Across the companies we have been speaking to in Nigeria and Senegal, the pattern repeats. There is investment in tools. There is less investment in understanding what the tools need in order to work. The assumption in too many places is that information management is a software problem. Buy the right system, plug it in, and the documents will organise themselves.
The reality is that software without structure is a very expensive folder. Structure without governance is a folder with a lock that nobody has the key to.
Why This Moment Is Different to Anywhere Else
When international oil companies built their information management systems in Nigeria over decades, they built them for themselves. The naming conventions, document numbering logic, asset registers, tag lists, folder structures, all of it was designed around how the IOC wanted to manage that asset, in alignment with its global standards and internal platforms.
When the divestments happened and assets transferred to indigenous operators, the data stayed but the institutional knowledge left. Companies like Renaissance are now operating a portfolio of assets with documentation built for someone else's system, referencing someone else's tag structure, stored in someone else's naming conventions. The opportunity is not to copy that system wholesale into a new platform. The opportunity is to assess what is there, understand what is usable, and build a structure that actually serves how they work.
Senegal has an even cleaner opportunity. Petrosen E&P is building its upstream capability during an era where information management standards, cloud infrastructure and digital tools are more mature and accessible than they have ever been. They do not need to repeat the mistakes that European and North American operators made in the 1980s and 1990s when they were building from nothing. They can start correctly. The standards exist. The methodology exists. The only thing missing is the decision to prioritise it.
Africa's late entry into large-scale energy production is not a disadvantage in information management terms. It is an advantage. There is no legacy system to unpick, no decade-old document numbering convention baked into 50,000 files, no political cost to overhauling a process that three generations of staff have been trained on. The foundation can be right from the beginning. That opportunity does not exist for most of the mature energy markets. It exists here, now.
Is Your Organisation Ready? Use This Table to Find Out
| Where your company currently sits | What it means |
|---|---|
| Information is spread across email, shared drives and individual laptops | The foundation does not yet exist. The opportunity to build it correctly is still available. |
| A DMS or SharePoint has been implemented but adoption is inconsistent | The tool exists but the governance does not. This is fixable, but it requires structured intervention. |
| Documents are in a system but not linked to physical assets or tag numbers | You have information. You do not yet have asset information. The connection needs to be built. |
| Asset data uses different naming conventions across engineering, maintenance and operations | You have a data silo problem. Every digital initiative built on top of this will inherit the inconsistency. |
| Information management was defined at the start of the project and has been maintained | You are in the minority. Protect it, document the governance, and do not let it erode during handover. |
The Window Is Not Permanent
The companies that will operate most efficiently in African energy over the next two decades are the ones that make a deliberate decision about information management now, before the complexity compounds. Every additional project, every new contractor, every system integration added without a shared information standard makes the problem harder and more expensive to correct.
The irony is that the companies with the most to gain from getting this right are often the ones most likely to deprioritise it. Growth is fast. Headcount is stretched. The pressure is on production, not on documentation. The documentation problem stays quiet until it is not. By the time it becomes loud, the cost of fixing it has grown considerably.
The Final Word
This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Not because the tools are new. Not because the standards have recently changed. It is a once-in-a-generation opportunity simply because Africa's energy sector is at a moment of genuine formation, and the decisions being made right now about how assets are identified, documented and managed will either enable or constrain everything that comes after.
The question is not whether to invest in information management. The question is whether it happens before the operational problems arrive or after.
At SøDera we help energy companies across Nigeria, Senegal and the wider African market build the information and asset data foundation that operations require. If you are building something significant and want to make sure the information foundation matches the ambition, that is exactly the kind of conversation we would like to have.
Stay informed
Get new insights in your inbox
When we publish a new article on RDS, document management, or asset data strategy, we will send it to you directly. No noise, no marketing. Just the article.
Unsubscribe any time. We do not share your email.