Shell MD calls for multilateral approach in oil sector

Mr Osagie Okunbor, Managing Director of Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) of Nigeria, has called for a multilateral approach towards efficient oil and gas sector in Nigeria.

Okunbor made the call on Thursday in Abuja, at the “Society of Petroleum Engineers, Oloibiri Lecture Series and Energy Forum” organised by the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE).

The Shell MD represented by Mr Sam Ezugworie, General Manager, Development, Shell, said there was a need for partnership between the government, industry and academia for an efficient oil sector.

According to Okunbor, the oil and gas sector also needs to focus on human capital development and embrace digital transformation to heighten production and minimise intruders’ interference.

“For us to achieve portfolio optimisation, some strategic imperative needs to begin to get into the mix because we need to look at our environmental factors and energy kind.

“The high margin of our operations will have to be replaced by low cost observations. We will then have to look at our physical considerations.

“The physical considerations are something that is at the deep of being actualized through the PIB and having a favourable PIB is also foundational and key to achieving professional excellence.

“If you look at professional excellence in action, I will like to reference the business transformation and operational excellence world summit that carried out research across 86 industry sessions all over the world.

“It might be interesting to see that on the top eight leading companies in operational excellence across the world, not even one of them is in the oil and gas sector.

“This calls for every one of us to pause and begin to reflect; if you are not in the top eight, are you in the game at all? We are not,” Okunbor said.

The Shell MD noted that the likes of Amazon, Toyota, Google and Apple now top leading companies in the world going by their balance sheets.

This, he said, was a clear indication that oil and gas could go into extinction if nothing urgent was done.

Okunbor added that the industry players must have organisational cultural shift from what used to be obtained, so as to make the oil sector one of the top business sectors in the world.

He said “We are used to doing some things in the past thinking that what brought us to point A is capable of bringing us to point B.

“The world has taught us a lesson, either from COVID, from the low oil price, and from all the responses that the world economy has put in place, that indeed what we did is insufficient.

“One may also be thinking that investors will not be able to put money in our business anymore rather, they will go to the cloud computing or something else.

“So, we need to begin to do things differently and if you ask me, what do we need to think about, we need to benchmark ourselves against other parts of the industry.

“We have to shift from looking at ourselves as being oil and gas and a special people because we are no longer special.

“We need to think and reflect that the whole world and businessmen and women all over the world, will like to put their money where they will get the best reward.

“The first and the visible thing we need to do is leadership action; every leader in the industry will have to challenge him or herself to a point where we begin to reject our current position and say that we need to do things differently.”