Dickson Okotie is the Chief Executive Officer, CEO, of Eunisell Solutions, an African focused oil service company that offers accelerated field development solutions to Nigerian oil and gas marginal fields. In this interview with Sebastine Obasi, he speaks about marginal fields’ development and the implementation of the Nigerian Content Act. Excerpts

Eunisell has been in the industry for more than 17 years and is known to have handled capital intensive projects that are impacting on the industry. Yet these are kept out of public knowledge. Why did you choose to be less visible? Generally, as a company we prefer our work to speak for itself. We don’t like screaming and shouting about what we do and how we do it.

We want it to be driven from a customer perspective, what we have done for them and how we did it, centered around service quality, safety and cost in a timely manner. So far, so good, words are going around amongst especially the marginal field operators, telling themselves how we have come to do certain things.

And it is quite amazing with different product streams we have been able to deliver from inception, our core business being surface well testing.

However, we have transcended beyond that to doing majorly the production optimisation of services. We have successfully built a facility that was funded by us and today, we have not had any hazards. We have also gone further to do a couple of things beyond that like doing injectivity, compressions, basically product EWTs, which is extended well testing, products that enhance clients’ cash flow.

But that notwithstanding, we have also built alliances across the stream of the industry where we feel that due to the challenges clients face, we also take them from the whole concept of drilling to delivering production. Eunisell is reputed as the only indigenous company in the industry with major technical competence required in building a central processing facility and the only one with the capability to render hydraulic leads service reel hub drive service.

How did you achieve this?

I would give credit to the Nigerian content group, because if not for them we would not have been challenged with the HFL and the RDS. HFL is an abbreviation for hydraulic flying leads, while RDS is reel drive service. TOTAL first called and said they were told that there is no Nigerian company that could handle the services that have predominantly been done for them by the likes of the Baker Hughes and when they came, they said: we would like to challenge you guys with this service.

I asked them what they meant by this service. Most of us that are in the local services industry today might not be the IOCs but we used to be these people in those IOCs that did those things and there is nothing that we will be challenged with that we will not see through. We got challenged with the RDS because of our respective level of experience, especially for the company like the size of Eunisell that has over a hundred years of experience in-house. We were able to see it through like a hot knife running through butter.

Till today, we have also extended such services to ExxonMobil and we are doing it day by day, we have not had any non-conformance, or shut down till date and this service has been on since inception for over four years. The Qua Iboe marginal field (OML 11) recently joined the league of performing fields. Your company was said to have financed the project.

What attracted you to the marginal field and what kind of arrangement do you have with Network Exploration and Production Limited, the owners of the project?

I would like to say a big thank you to the Executive Director of Network E&P, Chief Femi Olagbemide. Like he would always say, I have known you through my work experience in ExxonMobil as their operations manager, and with time we have come to know that you are the driving force behind product lines in Eunisell, with your can-do-attitude, you can almost see everything through.

It was of no doubt that when he made the decision to say irrespective of all the stories the international service companies have told him that they can deliver it. And he looked at the size of the company and said, I know my partners, wihich is Oando Group came to tell me that you guys would not be able to deliver it because of the Nigeria antecedent they have had in the past.

But he said, every day I have looked at these guys’ antecedents, challenges are what they thrive on and we would give them the opportunity to be able to see this through because either way it goes, we really don’t have anything to lose especially as they would be playing with their cash flow.

Some indigenous companies allege that the Local Content Act has not been fully maximised due to lapses in implementation. What changes do you want to see in the Content Act, to make it more effective?

I just think that the Nigerian Content Act is for all Nigerian companies, irrespective of what part of the country you come for and I think it needs to be more centralised where one company is not given undue opportunities over the others. I know that there are alliances, strategies, but I feel that the industry should be a fair- playing ground for all Nigerian companies.

For instance it would amaze you that some companies usually would be registered in one end of the Nigerian content group but does not transcend from one to the other. They have a way of bottlenecking it so that friends and cronies would get ahead of the others. It is a shame, but I just think what truly drives the industry is competence and deliverability.