Baker Hughes shows the way to boost oil production

Baker Hughes, an oil servicing company has always been interested in ensuring that it enhances the production of oil and gas production in the country through its technological innovations.

It was this desire that pushed the company to assemble many of the oil-producing companies both indigenous and international oil companies (IOCs) in Lagos last week to consider how the so-called marginal fields can be rejuvenated and boost their production level for the betterment of the industry.

According to Ayo Shote, managing director of Baker Hughes in the country, the indigenous operators are becoming more important in Nigeria and because they inherited some of the marginal fields from the IOCs, adding that “in Baker Hughes we feel that they might not have in-house some of the expertise that they need to actually get some of these fields back to production and profitability.

“So as an oil and gas service company, what we wanted to do is how to get what we know to these marginal field operators and not just at different products line which we have been doing in the past but to offer an integrated solution to them.”

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He said the company actually created the forum to enable its officials sit down with both the marginal field operators and the IOCs and these entities told the company officers what they want to achieve in a particular field, and two years down the line, they will say “this is what I want to see. So we work with them from the planning stage to the production stage to actualise what they want. So that was the essence of this event.”

Brownfield Rejuvenation is very important to Nigeria, it is important to them, (Marginal Field Operator) and the company has at different level the expertise to help them actualise what they are looking for and we want to present it to them on a single platform and that is our stated goal in this event.

The Baker Hughes boss is not oblivious of the various challenges that this would pose but he said it not insurmountable. “Is obviously going to be difficult but it is not impossible. Statutory, there will be several obstacles. Our contracting environment in Nigeria is one, where you might not be able to have a bundle service solution.”

He said the world is rapidly changing, innovation is part of the world, change is part of the world, adding that things would change sometime in the future but that what is important is that in Baker Hughes believes in customer market where it would be able to show it customers that it have these Technical-Know-How and the ability to do these jobs and get them thinking.

“As we are now on a day-to-day basis discussion with them and have good interaction with them then we will begin to build a model that they want to see. We will have different model for different customers. The question is – are we talking to them at that level?

I think we are, still talking to them on a single product line level not at the different model for different customers level. And there is lot of economic scale that we can achieve with when we talk to them about different products at the same time. So that is what we are looking at right now.”