Listening to Nigeria’s top energy officials, it would be easy to assume that Africa’s biggest oil exporter is cruising towards its goal of doubling output by 2010. Talk to oil company executives, however, and anxieties over rising costs, attacks by militants and the government’s push for a bigger share of profits make prospects seem distinctly gloomy.

Forty years after commercial quantities of oil were discovered in Nigeria, President Umaru Yar’Adua has launched the most ambitious reform process the industry has seen. At a time of record oil prices, his success or otherwise in raising output from its current level of about 2.3m b/d will affect the global economy and influence energy security in the US and Europe.