Presidential candidate of the Accord Party, Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim, has unveiled what he described as the production backbone of his Energy First Presidential Agenda, promising to increase Nigeria’s crude oil production to at least four million barrels per day within 24 months of taking office.

Hashim made the pledge during an appearance on Channels Television’s Politics Today, where he outlined plans to leverage existing petroleum assets to rapidly boost production.

At the centre of his proposal is an investment programme to revive about 3,000 currently non-producing oil wells.

“We have oil wells that have already been drilled, assets that have already been discovered and infrastructure that have already been built. Our first task is to put these assets back to work for Nigeria,” he said.

Hashim argued that the government should prioritise recovering existing productive assets rather than committing scarce public resources to projects such as the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, which he said may not generate revenue for the government for the next 20 years.

His proposal comes amid Nigeria’s current crude oil production of about 1.5 million barrels per day.

Achieving four million barrels per day would require an additional 2.5 million barrels daily, representing an increase of more than 160 per cent over current production levels.

The Accord candidate said Nigeria’s fundamental challenge was not a lack of petroleum resources but the failure to convert existing reserves and productive assets into reliable energy and economic output.

He said an Accord administration would consequently make production recovery one of its earliest priorities.

Under the proposed programme, the government would identify the reasons each viable inactive well is not producing and deploy the necessary capital and technical interventions to restore output.

The interventions could include well workovers and intervention, artificial lift systems, repairs to gathering infrastructure, pipeline rehabilitation, improved evacuation systems and other field-specific measures.

Hashim described the 3,000 inactive wells as more than dormant petroleum assets, arguing that they represent wasted productive capacity.

“The question is not how much oil Nigeria has underground. The question is why we are not producing the oil that our existing assets are capable of producing,” he added.

He also proposed establishing a National Production Recovery Dashboard to monitor every intervention, investment and additional barrel generated under the programme.

Hashim said the dashboard would provide a mechanism for tracking progress and ensuring that investments in reviving existing oil assets translate into measurable increases in national production.