By Clara Nwachukwu

Nigerian unit of French oil giant, Total, said it has added about 2.2 billion barrels of oil to the nation’s oil mix over the past 45 years between 1966 and December 2011, as one of its major numerous achievements in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector since its 50 years of operations.

In a brochure distributed to participants and visitors to the Society for Petroleum Engineers, SPE, annual conference and exhibitions in Lagos, the company said it has also invested about $10billion in the country in the last five years.

The brochure, which captured all the breakthroughs by the Total upstream companies in Nigeria, also indicted that it had participated in seven development projects both ongoing and under study in the country.

Among the list of other major milestones included, the involvement in 50 oil and gas permits in the country, nine of which it is the operator, a development that placed it as Nigeria’s fourth largest producer. In fact, it had continuously engaged in the production of oil from its Oil Mining Lease, OML 58 for 40 years without interruptions.

Total which is in Joint Venture, JV, with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, said it the international oil company that partners the most with indigenous oil companies to boost local content development.

Some of the partnerships are with South Atlantic Petroleum, SAPETRO, in Akpo; Conoil in OML 136 and Oil Prospecting Licence, OPL 257; Emo on OPL 285; Noreast on OPL 215; and Amni International on OMLs 112 and 117.

Google, MIT initiative

Total upstream companies has also entered into strategic corporate partnership with Google and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, to empower Nigerian lecturers in the faculties of Science and Engineering, to develop a new curriculum and teaching methods in tertiary education.

During the SPE, the first set of participants shared their experiences and knowledge gained from the science and technology initiative with their counter parts from various universities in the country.

According to one the beneficiaries of the scholarship, Dr Jaiyeola Opadiji, there is a need for total overhauling of the curriculum and methods of learning if Nigeria must develop technologically.

Making a comparative analysis of their curriculum at MIT and Nigerian universities, Opadiji explained that Nigerian university curriculum does not encourage students to really use their innate abilities to add values to the body of knowledge and develop their potential. This is because most scholars were often caught up with memorizing the lecturers’ notes and reproducing same in examinations in an attempt to pass without necessarily assimilating the knowledge impacted.

He noted that students were “pushed out” annually through handouts and other course information, without ensuring that they really understood the import of the knowledge being impacted.

Whereas at MIT, students rarely failed their courses because of the type of curriculum they used to make them useful to the society by adding value to the knowledge acquired.

The lecturer, who said they were given the task of auditing departmental courses and their relevance to the society, observed that most of the courses taught in Nigeria universities in one semester were mere repetitions or duplications of the same courses under different headings.

He said that aside from the auditing of curriculum, lectures, recitation, and open access to academic materials, laboratory, weekly seminars and a host of others, were organised for students to share knowledge.

Opadiji reflecting on the poor state of Nigerian universities emphasized the need to develop a symbiotic partnership between industry and tertiary institutions such that the challenges militating against teaching and learning would be tackled within record time.

Knowledge acquired

At the end of the course, participants said they were exposed to new methods of teaching and learning, open access to academic resources, weekly seminars, and were also able to establish collaborative networks with MIT professors.

Giving an insight into the genesis of the new synergy with MIT/Google, former executive director, External Affairs, Total, Mr John Addeh, said the lecturers’ empowerment scheme was borne from Total’s experience with the establishment of Institute of Petroleum Studies. He described the MIT/Google project as a train-the-trainer strategy geared towards computer engineering, chemical engineering and other engineering fields to open up more studies in these fields more than the liberal sciences.

He argued that with more people participating in the programme, Total will be able to create a generation of Google lecturers, adding that the first set of eight lecturers will soon be joined by another set of 12 to be drawn from other faculties such as mechanical engineering, geophysics, ocean engineering , geology and a host of others.