Financial Energy Review
The Deputy Managing Director, Deep Water District of Total Exploration and Production Nigeria Limited, Engr. Ahmadu Kida-Musa, has said. that emerging and innovative technologies are key to ‘big find’ in the oil and gas industry. According to him the dependence on conventional technologies that have been used in the past will surely not be the only solution to harness the Yet-To-Find oil and gas potentials especially in Nigeria.
Speaking at the on-going 37th conference of the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists (NAPE), in Lagos Kida-Musa pointed out that there is the need for innovations in order to continue to increase reserves and come back to the era of more frequent giant discoveries as was obtained before 2012. “ In Nigeria for example, we will need to key-in to the use of emerging and innovative technologies from safe exploration to HSE compliant exploitation of the discovered resources. The belief by some school of thought might be that in Nigeria we have totally mastered exploration in the onshore, in the conventional offshore and evensomewhat in the deep offshore domains, but this is certainly not an accurate hypothesis. There are still Yet-To-Find opportunities all around in those mature domains, especially for deep prospectivity and also the Ultra Deep Offshore domain, where little or no exploration activities have been carried out to date”.Kida Musa said.
He maintained that there are billions of barrels of oil and trillions cubic feet of gas yet to be discovered in Nigeria. “Even in the “so called” mature areas not to mention the frontier areas yet to be explored at all. I am sure that the exploration gurus in this gathering can attest to this fact. With a combination of enabling policies and innovation technologies, this situation can be turned around” he said.
The President of NAPE, Ajibola Oyebamiji, in his welcome address at the pre-conference workshop emphasized that the pre-conference workshop is important because it has always produced templates that had formed pieces of legislation. Adding that the theme ‘Emerging Technologies and the Nigerian oil and gas sector: Global Trends and Regional Peculiarities’ is apt given that technology is the heart of all the significant achievements in the oil and gas industry. “The way hydrocarbon was discovered, developed and produced, has been impacted by evolutionary technologies that have emerged since Drake well of 1859. Adding that the challenges are how far has Nigeria travelled down the technology road” he said.
