Breaking the Digital Barrier: A Nigerian-Specific Digital Maturity and Adoption Framework for Smart Fields in E&P Operations

Abstract The upstream oil and gas industry in Nigeria faces a distinct combination of ageing infrastructure, security risks and power instability that makes direct application of global digital frameworks impractical. This study developed a Nigeria-specific Digital Maturity Index (DMI) and applied it to four representative field types: marginal, swamp, mature onshore and shallow offshore. The DMI is built around five pillars adapted to local conditions: Trusted Data Foundation, Resilient Connectivity, Remote Field Operations, Operational Alerts and Analytics and Collaborative Teams. Each pillar is defined on a five-level scale from manual and ad hoc operations at Level 1 to fully integrated and predictive operations at Level 5. A structured desk review of over twenty Nigerian regulatory documents, industry reports, academic papers and operator annual reports was used to assign maturity bands for each archetype. Results show that most Nigerian field archetypes sit between Level 1 and Level 3. Marginal fields score at or near Level 1 across all pillars, while shallow offshore fields reach Level 3 to 4 on some pillars. Trusted Data Foundation and Operational Alerts and Analytics are consistently the weakest pillars, indicating that data is used mainly for regulatory compliance rather than for proactive asset management. The upgrade roadmap derived from these findings prioritises low-cost, incremental steps: tablet-based data capture at the wellsite, solar-powered telemetry, shared live dashboards and structured cross-functional review routines. These steps can advance each field type to Level 3 within realistic Nigerian security, power and local-content constraints.