Ufuoma Oghene has been appointed Chief Operating Officer of Midwestern Oil & Gas Company Limited, the Nigerian independent energy company that operates the Umusadege field in Delta State. The company announced the appointment on November 9, 2026, and it stands as one of the most consequential operations hires in Nigeria’s indigenous oil sector this year.
As COO, Ufuoma Oghene takes strategic oversight of the company’s operations — the portfolio the company itself describes as production optimisation, operational efficiency, project execution and technical assurance, all in service of sustainable growth. It is the job that turns a field’s potential into barrels, safely and on schedule.
A Career Built in the Engine Room
The company says Oghene brings more than 27 years of experience across asset development, production operations, subsurface management, technical governance and portfolio leadership. The documented core of that record is easy to trace. He spent roughly sixteen years at the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC), joining as a Senior Production Technologist in 2008 and rising through field development and execution leadership and head of technical planning to Development Production Technology Manager and Technical Authority — the level at which an engineer’s judgement settles technical questions for an asset.
In April 2025 he moved to Renaissance Africa Energy Company as Production Technology Manager and Development Leader, arriving just after Renaissance completed its takeover of SPDC’s onshore business — one of the largest ownership transitions in Nigerian oil history. Seven months later, Midwestern has hired him away to run its operations.
His name also sits on the industry’s technical literature: he is a co-author of Society of Petroleum Engineers conference papers going back to 2011, including work on integrated 3D modelling in a structurally complex brown field and on reserves estimation. Operators do not hand the COO title to figureheads. They hand it to people whose technical authority the field already respects.
The Company He Joins
Midwestern Oil & Gas was incorporated in 1999 by Nigerian investors and the Delta State Government, and commenced operations in 2001. Under the federal marginal fields programme, it was awarded a 70 percent interest in the Umusadege field — today PML 22, formerly OML 56 — in 2003, and it operates the asset in joint venture with SunTrust Atlantic Energies, which holds the remaining 30 percent. Its head office sits in Lekki Phase 1, Lagos; its operations run out of Umusadege, Kwale, in Delta State.
Oghene’s arrival completes a leadership build. Midwestern’s Managing Director and CEO, Engr. (Mrs.) Elozino Olaniyan — the company’s first female chief executive — took office on December 1, 2025. A new CEO setting direction and a career production technologist running operations is a deliberate pairing: governance at the top, technical depth at the controls.
Why This Move Matters
Nigeria’s onshore oil map is being redrawn. Assets built and run for decades by international majors are passing to indigenous operators — Renaissance’s SPDC takeover is the headline example — and the companies that win the next decade will be the ones whose technical benches can hold production, manage decline, and execute projects without the majors’ machinery behind them.
That is the context for this hire, and for our People on the Move coverage at Black Business Review: the leadership of African energy is consolidating in African hands, one senior appointment at a time. Ufuoma Oghene’s move — from the field teams of SPDC, through the Renaissance transition, to the COO office at Midwestern — is that story in a single career.
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