Natural resources
Natural resources of Nigeria
From oil in the Niger Delta to cocoa in the southwest and tin on the Jos Plateau, Nigeria's resources have shaped its regions, its economy and, at times, its conflicts. These pages explain what a resource is, where it comes from and its role in the country's history, without reporting live prices or production figures that change by the week.
18 resources
Mineral
Bitumen
Bitumen, the heavy tar-like hydrocarbon used in road surfacing, occurs in a belt of tar sands along the eastern edge of the Dahomey basin, most extensively in Ondo State. It has been known and surveyed for over a century and remains, unusually among Nigeria's resources, largely unexploited on any commercial scale.
Edo · Lagos · Ogun
Agricultural
Cassava
Cassava is the most widely grown food crop in Nigeria, planted in almost every state and processed into garri, fufu, starch and flour. Unlike the export crops, its importance is domestic: it is the staple that carries households through poor seasons, because the roots keep in the ground until they are needed.
Abia · Benue · Cross River
Mineral
Coal
Coal gave Enugu its nickname, the Coal City, and gave colonial Nigeria its first large industrial workforce. The seams of the Enugu escarpment fuelled the railways and power stations of the early and mid-twentieth century before oil and diesel displaced them.
Benue · Enugu · Gombe
Agricultural
Cocoa
Cocoa is the crop of the Nigerian south-west. Grown on smallholdings in the forest belt of Ondo, Osun, Oyo, Ekiti and neighbouring states, it financed schools, roads and public buildings in the Western Region and remains a defining part of Yoruba farming life.
Cross River · Delta · Edo
Mineral
Columbite
Columbite is an ore of niobium, found alongside tin in the granite belts of the Jos Plateau. Once a by-product of tin working, it became valuable in its own right in the mid-twentieth century when niobium found industrial uses in high-strength steel and heat-resistant alloys.
Bauchi · Kaduna · Nasarawa
Agricultural
Cotton
Cotton links the savannah farms of the north to the weaving traditions of its cities and, for much of the twentieth century, to the textile mills of Kaduna. Indigenous cotton was spun and woven long before export cultivation, and the cloth traditions it fed are covered in the pages on traditional arts.
Gombe · Kaduna · Kano
Forestry
Cross River Rainforest Timber
The rainforest of Cross River State holds the largest surviving block of tropical high forest in Nigeria, and its hardwood timber has been logged for well over a century. The same forest is the country's most important reservoir of wildlife and plant diversity, which is why timber and conservation are so closely entangled there.
Cross River · Edo · Ondo
Energy
Crude Oil
Crude oil is the resource that reshaped Nigeria's economy, its federal politics and the fortunes of the Niger Delta more than any other. It is found in the sedimentary basin of the delta and in the shallow waters offshore, and it has been produced continuously since the late 1950s. Oil turned a country whose exports had been dominated by palm oil, groundnut and cocoa into one whose public revenue came mainly from a single commodity.
Abia · Akwa Ibom · Bayelsa
Mineral
Gold
Gold is found in the ancient basement rocks of the north-west and south-west, in quartz veins and in the gravels of streams that drain them. It was worked and traded long before colonial rule, briefly mined industrially in the twentieth century, and is today dominated by small-scale and artisanal working, most prominently in Zamfara and Osun states.
Kaduna · Kebbi · Kwara
Agricultural
Groundnut
Groundnut was the export crop of the northern savannah and the origin of one of Nigeria's most recognisable images: the groundnut pyramids stacked beside the railway at Kano. It grew on Hausa smallholdings across the drier north and, for several decades, dominated the region's cash economy.
Bauchi · Jigawa · Kaduna
Mineral
Iron Ore
Iron ore is the resource on which Nigeria's attempt to build an integrated steel industry rested. The deposit at Itakpe in Kogi State was developed from the late 1970s to feed the steel complex at Ajaokuta, a project whose incomplete history is now inseparable from the ore itself.
Delta · Enugu · Kaduna
Mineral
Lead and Zinc
Lead and zinc occur together in mineral veins along the Benue Trough, the long geological depression that runs diagonally across Nigeria. The best-known workings are around Abakaliki and Ishiagu in Ebonyi State, where the ores have been mined industrially and by hand for the best part of a century.
Benue · Ebonyi · Nasarawa
Mineral
Limestone
Limestone is the raw material of cement, and it is the mineral behind Nigeria's largest non-oil industrial plants. Deposits in the south and centre of the country have supported cement and lime works for more than half a century, including major works in Ogun and Cross River states.
Benue · Cross River · Ebonyi
Energy
Natural Gas
Natural gas occurs in the same Niger Delta basin as crude oil, both dissolved in oil as associated gas and in separate non-associated fields. For much of the industry's history the associated gas was flared rather than gathered, and building the plants and pipelines to use it became a long-running project in the south-south and beyond.
Akwa Ibom · Bayelsa · Delta
Marine
Niger Delta and Coastal Fisheries
Fishing is the oldest livelihood of the Nigerian coast. The creeks, mangrove channels and inshore waters of the Niger Delta and the coastline east and west of it support artisanal fisheries that feed millions of people and underpin the culture of the Ijaw, Itsekiri, Ilaje and other riverine and coastal communities.
Akwa Ibom · Bayelsa · Cross River
Agricultural
Palm Oil
Oil palm is native to the forests of southern Nigeria, and the oil pressed from its fruit was the country's first great export commodity. Long before crude oil, it was palm oil and palm kernels from Igbo, Ibibio and Ijaw country that drew European traders to the delta ports.
Abia · Akwa Ibom · Cross River
Agricultural
Rubber
Natural rubber, tapped from the Para rubber tree, is grown mainly in Edo and Delta states, where the plantations and research stations of the south-south forest belt made it a significant export crop for much of the twentieth century.
Abia · Cross River · Delta
Mineral
Tin
Tin, worked from cassiterite ore, is the resource most closely associated with the Jos Plateau. Smelted locally long before colonial rule, it became the centre of an industrial mining field in the early twentieth century that drew workers from across northern Nigeria and reshaped the landscape and society of Plateau State.
Bauchi · Kaduna · Plateau