Last Friday felt like reliving the past again because it showed the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) Executive Secretary, Engr. Felix Omatsola Ogbe in the act of reassuring oil and gas service companies and their stakeholders that more support would come their way through the speedy award of contracts from the relevant industry body or institution.

The Executive Secretary said this three days ago while in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital currently seeing feisty bickering and competition by political oppositions. Engr. Ogbe who gave similar assurances earlier this year, on Friday, was out leading officials of the Board and Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC) to see the organisations with strength in pipe coating and services related to this field.

One of the companies visited was Brightwaters Energy Limited, which used to be Willbros Nigeria Ltd. Also receiving guests were Solewant Nigeria Limited and Pipe Coaters Nigeria Limited (PCNL), managed by Tenaris Nigeria Ltd.

According to the Executive Secretary, the visitations were to assess the companies’ facilities and determine how the Board could galvanise the industry to patronise them. He underscored the importance of getting first-hand information on in-country capabilities before making key decisions on oil and gas projects.

The recently appointed Board chief insisted that operating companies must support and patronise local oil and gas service companies in compliance with the provisions of the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development (NOGICD) Act.

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Ogbe emphasised that activities in the Nigerian oil and gas industry must be used to create employment opportunities for the nation’s teeming youths and help revive the economy, in line with the aspirations of President Bola Tinubu.

The Chief Executive Officer of Brightwaters Energy Limited, Mr. Scott Gregory thanked the Executive Secretary for his visit and then highlighted Brightwaters’s historic feat of carrying out Nigeria’s first pipe coating in 1962.

He recalled that the facility had 3,000 employees some years back, executing various spheres of oil and gas projects. He conveyed the management’s aspiration to return the firm to those high-performance levels and sought the Board’s support to win oil and gas projects that would resuscitate the sprawling facility.

We feel that we can be a positive contributor to Nigeria through the capacities that we have, says the Brightwaters CEO. We want to bring real, true value to the table. He admitted that the coating facility had suffered downtime, but assured that the plant would be up and running within 60 days of the award of a new contract.

And so, the NCDMB entourage continued to meetings with the Chairman of Tenaris Nigeria, Dr. Ernest Nwapa who welcomed the NCDMB’s team to PCNL’s facilities. He commended the efforts made by the agency to push local content in the industry, attributing it to the good culture that had been established at the Board over the years.

At Solewant Group, an EPCI and Pipe Coating Company, the NCDMB delegation pretty much repeated acts and got to see the 5MG generators the company had procured to guarantee power supply to the facility.

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Meiza Nigeria