We hear from Chinenye Amorha, Business Development Manager (Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa) about the role of digital technologies in helping West Africa scale its oil and gas operations.
Chinenye, tell us how the energy industry in West Africa has evolved in the time you’ve been working in it.
The local industry’s come on leaps and bounds since its first oil discovery in 1956. But it’s the past few years that have been the most fruitful in terms of new projects and developments.
A third oil field in Northern Nigeria was recently inaugurated but it’s not just these discoveries which spark optimism. Large projects, like the Dangote Refinery, demonstrate that the region is becoming a key player on the global oil and gas stage.
Nigeria is at a turning point within the industry and with the right tools we could see a huge boom in prosperity, once the infrastructure can meet the abundance of available resources.
How and where exactly can digital technologies be used in oil and gas operations – and what are the benefits of using them in a rapidly growing sector?
Digital technologies, particularly digital twins, have a significant impact by providing virtual replicas of physical objects, systems, or environments like our digital twin, R2S. Giving an exact simulation of its real-world counterpart, it helps to monitor and plan operations.
Using digital twins in oil and gas operations provides asset owners with the opportunity to react quickly to potential faults. This helps to reduce downtime, maximise output, and ultimately – increase operational efficiency.
Not to mention that in a rapidly scaling industry, safety is paramount and digital twins have the added benefit of optimising safety measures. By facilitating informed decisions, digital twins give operators peace of mind as they can help to prevent both asset and human damage.
What could the risks of deprioritising digital technologies be for operators?
Nigeria's technological innovation has flourished, yet the oil and gas sector lags in digital implementation. Maintenance schedules and asset plans are still manually developed and updated.
Deprioritising digitalisation means that whilst new discoveries might be made, we won’t be able to reap the true benefits and maximise results. It’s also important to consider current operations and brownfield sites. Digitalisation has huge potential to revitalise our ongoing operations as well as new ones and not fully integrating them is a disservice to the industry.
Additionally, without the proven digital technology, operators face delayed reaction to hazards and physical risks. Before digitialisation, these events were difficult to avoid, but dangerous asset failures, fires, and potential casualties can all be mitigated with the right tools.
"Nigeria's technological innovation has flourished, yet the oil and gas sector lags in digital implementation. Maintenance schedules and asset plans are still manually developed and updated."
Chinenye Amohra, Business Development Manager
Are there any takeaways for West African oil & gas operators looking to enhance production with digital tools?
Examples from Europe spring to mind here. Brownfield sites in the region have previously fallen foul of legacy organisational backlogs and systems which are not optimised to address current market challenges.
In one case, R2S was able to create a structured system to make maintenance work more efficient on brownfield assets in the North Sea by ranking anomalies by priority, providing their exact location and grouping them effectively. For this operator, we were able to reduce the time taken to locate anomalies by up to 15 minutes – a 99% decrease.
Of course, Europe had to learn these efficiencies through trial-and-error. West Africa has the opportunity to leapfrog this learning phase and avoid these issues by implementing digital technologies from the get-go.
Where are the greatest opportunities for digital technologies in energy operations?
West Africa’s oil and gas industry is on a steep trajectory and with the right digital tools, there isn’t any reason to stop. Nigeria, as a technological hub, is primed to roll out digitalisation, bolstering output and reinforcing processes to bring Nigeria into its rightful space in the spotlight.
As technology becomes embedded in the region, it will also lead to a demand for digital skills. This is where local training academies, such as in Angola, where AIS is helping trainees master the skills to use these digital technologies, will come into play. We can begin to plug skills gaps, but also build a new local workforce, ready to take on the digital challenges of today and tomorrow.
