……seeks re-orientation of Nigerian undergraduates to enable innovation, use of emerging technologies
Energy giant, the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited (SPDC) has called for the right investment climate in Nigeria, to enable the expansion of the country’s petroleum landscape, increase oil production from the current average of 2.3 million b/d to 3 million b/d and boost the country’s proven oil reserves to about 40 billion barrels through further exploration and appraisal.
Speaking at the National Association of Petroleum Explorationists’ (NAPE) 37th annual International Conference and Exhibition, the country chairman of Shell companies in Nigeria, and managing director, SPDC, Mr. Osagie Okunbor, said the right investment climate would also include strengthening our regulatory bodies, giving priorities to research and further enabling the industry’s financials.
“I believe that where the investment climate is right, digitalization and deployment of emerging technologies will enable incremental value creation over the coming years. I believe that if we appropriately apply the valuable information and lessons from this conference, our industry will experience a giant leap in transformation. It will support our aspiration of expanding Nigeria’s petroleum landscape, he said,” he said
Represented by Shell general manager, exploration, Mr. Dan Agbaire, the managing director also outlined the re-orientating the thinking of undergraduates in Nigerian universities as one of the critical actions to challenge them on the use of emerging technologies to enable innovation and allow the actualization of the Nigeria’s aspiration of expanding the petroleum landscape through digitalization, innovation and emerging technologies.
He told the NAPE Conference that Shell has collaborations with the academia in Nigeria and now has two successful centers of excellence that promote the emergence of industry-ready graduates at university level. According to him, Shell’s Centre of Excellence in Geosciences and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Benin established in 2012, while the Rivers State University Centre of Excellence in Marine and Offshore Engineering was established in 2017.
These, he said, came along with SPDC’s six Professorial Chairs and the Sabbatical & Internship programmes in key areas, which grow skills within Nigerian universities for the industry.
Okunbor informed that every year, since 1980, 10 Nigerian professors and 25 research interns commence one-year research programmes in SPDC and share their findings with SPDC in fields such as biodiversity, petroleum engineering, geophysics, impact assessment, community health and oil and gas exploration, contributing to providing critical industry input into higher education in Nigeria.
“In Shell, digitalization is more than technology. It is also about people and ensuring more agile ways of working. We employ leading data scientists who unlock value from the vast amounts of data that Shell has access to in a responsible manner whilst maintaining customer trust. Across all our businesses, we look for opportunities where we can replicate and use this at any scale.
“We look to use applicable standard technologies (unless there is a competitive advantage to building proprietary solutions) to change the way we search for and produce oil and gas, design wells, provide energy, or buy goods and services”, he said.
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