By George Onah
Port Harcourt – THE Niger Delta Development Commission has engaged no fewer than 65 youths of the region in the flag off of the NDDC Petroleum Engineering/ Drilling Graduate Training Programme for indigenes of the Niger Delta. There were over 5,000 applicants for the training programme.

Managing Director of the commission Mr. Chibuzor Ugwoha disclosed in Port Harcourt, Rivers State that the programme aims at preparing the trainees for employment opportunities in the oil industries and taking them out of poverty zone.

“The good news about this programme is that all participants are engineering graduates of tertiary institutions and the trainers are experts brought in from the oil fields in the United States and beyond” Ugwoha said.

As part of the course, the trainees shall be equipped with fundamentals of oil and gas exploitation, fundamentals of well site safety, both onshore and offshore, basics of hydrocarbon, well-logging with special emphasis in abnormal pressure evaluation.

Others are industrial techniques of well heads, welding casing, blowout preventer, mud-engineering techniques, mud-weight measurement, viscosity and additives. The second segment of the training would take place on the rigs, both onshore and offshore where trainees will be practically trained on petroleum and drilling skills.

Ugwoha reasoned that the region had over the years fallen short of skills in the areas of critical manpower needed in the oil and gas industry, adding “one of the commission’s immediate responses to the problem is the implementation and empowerment programme of the NDDC”.

Also, Ugwoha appealed to all stakeholders in the region, particularly the oil and gas sector to join hands with the commission “in making the local content policy of the Federal Government a reality and big a success”.

He explained that the policy, which is fully backed by law demands that “considerable efforts be made by stakeholders to ensure the utilization of Nigeria’s, human, material resources and services. This underscores our determination to undertake this specialized petroleum technology programme”.

NDDC recently flagged of its graduate computer training programme in continuation of the commission’s human capacity and empowerment programme.

Other such empowerment programme include the NDDC Technical Aid Corp which gave employment to 2000 unemployed graduates of the region, welding /fabrication programme as well as training of youths in various maritime trades at the Maritime Academy, Oron.