By Tode Morie

The Niger Delta’s network of flow stations, gas plants, and injection facilities represents one of the most complex petroleum production systems in Africa.

For young engineers entering the industry, understanding this intricate ecosystem requires more than textbook knowledge. It demands hands-on experience with the pumps, valves, turbines, and control systems that keep oil and gas flowing from wellheads to export terminals.

Joshua Umejuru’s journey through Shell Petroleum Development Company’s Graduate Programme provided exactly this kind of comprehensive exposure. As a Production Operations Engineer and Supervisor trainee, he rotated through four flow stations, two gas plants, and one water injection plant, immersing himself in health, safety, security, environment, operations, and maintenance activities. This wasn’t the glamorous side of petroleum engineering, it was the daily grind of keeping production facilities running safely and efficiently.

His work days involved routine checks on facility equipment, the kind of methodical inspection rounds that caught small problems before they became major failures. He participated in flow station startups after shutdown maintenance, complex procedures requiring careful coordination and attention to startup sequences. Each valve opened and pump started had to follow specific protocols to prevent equipment damage or safety incidents.

Umejuru learned the practical skills that separate theoretical knowledge from operational competence. Changing flow beans at wellheads, conducting well testing and sampling, taking gas lift measurements using clamp-on meters, these were hands-on tasks that taught him how production systems actually worked. He managed chemical injection of demulsifiers in well effluent and biocide injection at water injection plants, work that required understanding both the chemistry and the equipment.

The maintenance activities he participated in provided insight into equipment reliability and failure modes. He was involved in changing out a faulty valve at a saver pit centrifugal pump, performing 12,000-hour maintenance on a Solar Mars 100 turbine, desanding impulse lines of flow station level controllers, and installing remote ignition systems for pilot flares. Each maintenance task taught lessons about equipment design, failure mechanisms, and preventive maintenance strategies.

Working with process flow diagrams and piping and instrumentation diagrams, Umejuru developed the ability to understand complex facility layouts and trace process flows through multiple pieces of equipment. He participated in pig launching operations at flow stations and calibrated pressure gauges using dead weight testers and Barton chart recorders, building a foundation in instrumentation and measurement that would prove valuable throughout his career.

This rotation through Shell’s facilities also exposed him to the operational realities of working in Nigeria’s oil-producing regions. He learned about the relationship between oil companies and host communities, environmental considerations, and the importance of maintaining good stakeholder relationships. These lessons would prove valuable when he later moved to drilling operations, where understanding the broader context of oil and gas operations enhanced his effectiveness.

Before joining Shell, Umejuru had gained different but equally valuable experience as a Field Engineer with Fibow Petroleum and Environmental Engineering Consult, where he supervised oil spill containment and remediation projects for TotalEnergies EP Nigeria and Daewoo. This work in host communities taught him about environmental compliance, community relations, and the responsibilities oil companies bore beyond simply extracting hydrocarbons.

His educational foundation, a Master of Science in Petroleum Engineering and Project Development from the University of Port Harcourt’s Institute of Petroleum Studies and a Bachelor of Technology in Chemical/Petrochemical Engineering from Rivers State University of Science and Technology, provided the theoretical framework. But it was the hands-on experience in Shell’s graduate program that transformed academic knowledge into practical competence, preparing him for the drilling engineering challenges that would define his later career.