www.africaoilgasreport.com

The Champions League
The career trajectories of the two entrepreneurs profiled in the following pages provide an overview of the challenges, hopes and impediments in the local content drive in Nigeria, potentially Africa’s biggest hydrocarbon industry.
Nigeria wants to improve the quantum of composite value added or created in the Nigerian economy through the utilization of the country’s human and material resources, for the provision of goods and services in the petroleum industry.
Wole Shebioba was a geophysicist with Shell who ventured into data management; Ernest Azudialu trained as an accountant but grew up in the merchandise business, a skill he parlayed into Oilfield Engineering construction.
Nigeria is hoping to develop full homegrown, private sector companies to compete with Western and Asian firms in the areas of Engineering and Construction, Exploration, Production and sundry other disciplines.
It’s still early days yet, but some of the work to be done at individual and state levels  to reach the potential can be gleaned from the stories below.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Among the guests present at the opening of the WAGSCO-TGS Geophysical Data Centre in Lagos in mid September 2008 was Wole Shebioba, Managing Consultant/CEO of Petrodata, a petroleum data management company located across town from WTGDC.
It seemed odd.
The opening of WAGSCO ought to present enormous challenges to Petrodata Management, which had operated as the only privately owned, indigenous data centre in Nigeria’s vast upstream sector, for close to 10 years.
Had Mr Shebioba come to size up the competition? Afterall, some of his staff had been poached by the new company and besides, WAGSCO-TGS, a joint venture between an indigenous Nigerian entity and the Norwegian oilfield service firm TGS, was threatening to capture a significant size of the oil field data storage market.
But Shebioba shrugged off any question of competition. “In fact”, he responded with a large smile, “there is so much to do to boost, not just domiciliation of oil and gas field work in the country, but to collaborate among ourselves to improve competencies”.
Petrodata Management has come a long way since October 1999, when it opened shop. Indeed, the story goes back to well before then. Shebioba, a 1986 graduate of geophysics from the Federal University of Technology Akure(FUTA) ventured into the ground floor of the construct of the company, directly from a comfort zone in Shell.
It so happened that in 1996, Laide Adegbola, chief geophysicist for Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) of Nigeria, was retiring. He was on a farewell tour to the company’s  Eastern Division.
Shebioba, at the time, was supervising Western Geophysical, then acquiring a large three dimensional (3D) seismic data, carpeting the Nembe Creek and other nearby major and minor fields for Shell, in the east of the country.  “I was the Shell representative .....................full details in www.africaoilgasreport.com