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Ado Oseragbaje

NIGERIA - Energy & Mining

Game Changer

Vice President Sub Saharan Africa, Baker Hughes

Bio

Ado Oseragbaje is the Vice President Sub Saharan Africa for Baker Hughes, a GE company (BHGE). Prior to his current role, he served as the leader for GE Oil & Gas Sub-Saharan Africa. Before joining BHGE, he worked for 20 years at Schlumberger Oilfield services, most recently as Vice-President & Group Managing Director, West Africa for Schlumberger OFS. He holds a master’s of engineering degree in petroleum engineering from Imperial College of Science Technology & Medicine, University of London. He also received a diploma in real-time oilfield project management from Heriot-Watt University Scotland.

TBY talks to Ado Oseragbaje, Vice President Sub Saharan Africa of Baker Hughes, a GE company, on the problems with inefficiencies across supply chains, using technology to minimize inconveniences, and making offshore profitable again.

What is the main driver behind Baker Hughes becoming a GE company, and what are the benefits for the Nigerian oil and gas sector?

The great challenge for oil and gas companies lies in the fragmentation of the industry around them, including the technology sector, which suffers from a strong inefficiency in the supply chain. We will fix inefficiencies by identifying the technology and services that can be applied across the entire value chain of customer activities. Our new business—Baker Hughes, a GE company (BHGE)—is the first and only to bring together industry-leading equipment, services, and digital solutions across the entire oil and gas spectrum. For 120 years, the oil and gas industry has not done as good a job to incorporating learnings from other industries, but we are looking to successfully bring the elements of the GE store and the experiences of the wider GE group from other industries into Nigeria’s upstream sector, resulting in an overall cost reduction, efficiency improvement, and better synergy and technology applications. There are many applications that came from either advanced materials, turbines, processes, or plastics that we were able to bring into the mid and downstream turbomachinery business. In Nigeria, there is an upstream cost challenge, a down-stream efficiency challenge in terms of refining, as well as an end-user infrastructure challenge in terms of power generation, distribution, and consumption. By adopting BHGE in the up-, mid-, and down-stream and GE store at the back end, we will be able to address some of the issues related to power and electrification. Moreover, a company the size and scale of BHGE is able to support many of the indigenous oil and gas companies in their diversification efforts, supporting their development of mini refineries and LNG plants.

What are the requirements and benefits of these partnerships?

Anyone with a viable project is a potential partner. Part of the excitement around BHGE is that we have technology and solutions that can be scaled up or down to meet a particular customer’s needs. Our new global organization is designed to do just that: achieve business continuity, minimize disruption, and help operators meet and exceed their objectives. Our digital capability is a huge potential gamechanger for smaller companies because we are able to employ predictive maintenance; a smaller company cannot truly afford to shut down its production if it does not need to. Technology also allows us to find optimum shutdown hours. For example, 2% in absolute is a large number for smaller actors and makes a significant impact on their bottom line as opposed to a larger company. BHGE uses cloud-based software and advanced manufacturing to help operators take advantage of these opportunities—reducing risk and improving the productivity of their operations.

Do you have other projects where this process of digitalization is showing and coming through?

One of our goals is to make offshore profitable again. Many projects have been pushed out or canceled because they are cost prohibitive. We seek to look at the entire production infrastructure. In Nigeria, there are a few deepwater projects under development currently that represent a significant opportunity, both for the operator and for us to do something completely different. It has been around three and a half to four years now that we established our refurbishment and service center in Port Harcourt where we spent tens of millions of dollars in terms of investment to this point. We are looking at the next evolution of that, which is a multi-model facility in Calabar that we are putting together that initially started off as an oil and gas exclusive facility. As a result of the Bonga South West delays, we will service turbines for Nigeria and potentially sub-Saharan Africa; we will engage with the transportation business through the locomotives.

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