Investment in Africa's Oil, Gas to Increase Through 2016

Posted on : Thursday , 28th August 2014

 The Managing Director of baker Hughes Nigeria, Mr. Ayo Shote has predicted that investment in Africa's oil and gas business would increase beyond 2016.

‎Speaking at the company's Techno Day conference and Exhibition held recently in Lagos, Shote explained that these investments will continue to come into Africa because of huge potentials in Africa's oil and gas business. 

He identified key focus of this growth to include West Africa, which is dominated by Nigeria, as well as East Africa, North and Central Africa countries.

According to him, Africa cannot ‎be left out in the entire global energy landscape, stating that "we will continue to remain important and grow”.
“The big portion of this growth ‎will be in Nigeria. We have been in Nigeria since the beginning. Nigeria is biggest market globally and in Africa but we have a huge spread across Africa. In Nigeria we are seeing the increasing importance of indigenous participation,” he said.

Shote said to support the increase investment in Africa's oil and gas business, the company has a huge presence in the continent. 
He explained that energy goes beyond oil and gas to include the availability of safe and affordable energy so that the life of the man on the street will be affected for good.

To further support oil and gas investment in Nigeria, Shote said the company had spent above $500 million on research and development.

“We focus much on talent and capability development. In Nigeria within the Baker Hughes family, we are net exporter of talent, we actually take send more people out than we take. We have 92 per cent of nationalised work force in Nigeria today. That is because it is our desired to continually make a different not only on our employee but also our customers. We also have the Baker Hughes operating system which is an in-house development where we have all our policies and procedures located on a single platform and we use it not only as a training reserves we also use it as quality management reserves.We are able to achieve success in our operation because we focus on training. We do not employ people and think that they know everything. So we are focus on building a talented field organisation and as at this 2014 we have the target to employ 968 field engineers and mathematicians and that is 30 percent of what we did in 2013. Out of these we have 27 PhD holders,” he explained.

Also speaking, Mr. John Wilson said to enhance production capacity for mature fields, Baker Hughes has state –of- the -art technology that could meet the challenges in such field. 

Wilson explained that during production, cost effective technologies are needed to deal with water management. 
He also stated that $40 billion is spent to deal with unwanted water during production ‎but with Baker Hughes Chemical solution and other technologies for water control, the cost would be reduced.

The essence of these technologies, Wilson said is to keep the oil flowing from the reservoir for as long as possible.