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The Champions League
The career trajectories of the two entrepreneurs profiled in the following pages provide an overview of the challenges, hopes and impediments in the local content drive in Nigeria, potentially Africa’s biggest hydrocarbon industry.
Nigeria wants to improve the quantum of composite value added or created in the Nigerian economy through the utilization of the country’s human and material resources, for the provision of goods and services in the petroleum industry.
Wole Shebioba was a geophysicist with Shell who ventured into data management; Ernest Azudialu trained as an accountant but grew up in the merchandise business, a skill he parlayed into Oilfield Engineering construction.
Nigeria is hoping to develop full homegrown, private sector companies to compete with Western and Asian firms in the areas of Engineering and Construction, Exploration, Production and sundry other disciplines.
It’s still early days yet, but some of the work to be done at individual and state levels  to reach the potential can be gleaned from the stories below.

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Among the guests present at the opening of the WAGSCO-TGS Geophysical Data Centre in Lagos in mid September 2008 was Wole Shebioba, Managing Consultant/CEO of Petrodata, a petroleum data management company located across town from WTGDC.
It seemed odd.
The opening of WAGSCO ought to present enormous challenges to Petrodata Management, which had operated as the only privately owned, indigenous data centre in Nigeria’s vast upstream sector, for close to 10 years.
Had Mr Shebioba come to size up the competition? Afterall, some of his staff had been poached by the new company and besides, WAGSCO-TGS, a joint venture between an indigenous Nigerian entity and the Norwegian oilfield service firm TGS, was threatening to capture a significant size of the oil field data storage market.
But Shebioba shrugged off any question of competition. “In fact”, he responded with a large smile, “there is so much to do to boost, not just domiciliation of oil and gas field work in the country, but to collaborate among ourselves to improve competencies”.
Petrodata Management has come a long way since October 1999, when it opened shop. Indeed, the story goes back to well before then. Shebioba, a 1986 graduate of geophysics from the Federal University of Technology Akure(FUTA) ventured into the ground floor of the construct of the company, directly from a comfort zone in Shell.
It so happened that in 1996, Laide Adegbola, chief geophysicist for Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) of Nigeria, was retiring. He was on a farewell tour to the company’s  Eastern Division.
Shebioba, at the time, was supervising Western Geophysical, then acquiring a large three dimensional (3D) seismic data, carpeting the Nembe Creek and other nearby major and minor fields for Shell, in the east of the country.  “I was the Shell representative that was asked to conduct him around, and show him what we’ve been doing”.
Adegbola and Shebioba hit it off. “He told me what he wanted to do long term. In the short term he was interested in supplying personnel for Quality Control and Quality Assurance (QC/QA) in the seismic acqusistion business. Long term, he was looking to set up a robust data repository company that would capture most of the well and seismic data then being warehoused abroad by international companies.
In the meantime, Shebioba was nursing the idea of leaving Shell, a company he had then worked for 11 years since he joined as a Youth Service Corp on graduation. “I had had a nasty experience then in Shell, when militants invaded the houseboat, asked for Shell personnel, and asked us to sit down for six hours. Medevac (Medical Evacuation) by Shell failed.”
Even if he didn’t leave the company immediately, he wanted to leave Port Harcourt, the town that hosts Shell’s Eastern Division. He and Laide Adegbola began to communicate, as he plotted an exit strategy. “We were able to get a QC contract from SPDC. That was Techos”.
Meanwhile, funding requirement was deferring Laide Adegbola’s big dream; setting up Petrodata management
But the company began to take shape in bits. Adegbola had enlisted the services of Western Geophysical to provide technical personnel for Petrodata. “As funding was a problem, they toyed with the idea of bringing in Western Geophysical as an equity partner”, he recalls, now, in his spacious office in the Petrodata Centre in Ikeja in the north of Lagos. The promoters of Petrodata then included  Adegbola  himself, Richard Adelu, former  deputy director of the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), Nigeria’s regulatory agency for petroleum affairs, B.A. Soyode, a widely respected facilities engineer in the industry and Femi Lalude, the founding Managing Director of SNEPCO, the Shell Nigeria subsidiary that is in charge of deepwater acreages and other Nigerian sedimentary basins outside the Niger Delta.
The reason for looking to Western Geophysical was simple. To convince the international oil companies, who generate over 90% of seismic and well data in Nigeria, that their data was going to be safe and in good condition. “You had to tell them you were not going to operate like the strong room of the NNPC (the state hydrocarbon company) in Falomo, Lagos.”, Shebioba testifies. “Because of the sad experiences of NNPC Falomo strong-room, you needed an international company to allay the fears of multinationals that it wasn’t going to be business as usual”. (A bit of a background here: The Falomo strongroom refers to the storage space where NNPC warehoused data acquired by international companies and submitted to the corporation, it was poorly managed and a lot of data were either damaged or entirely lost).
The international companies needed to have a buy in into the idea, because the banks were not forthcoming with the funds to build a centre that Petrodata could showcase to the companies. It would cost just 40 million naira to start off (about Eight hundred thousand dollars, adjusted for inflation). “The banks just didn’t understand what they were talking about”.
So, as the promoters were talking to multinationals, who were the putative customers, they also felt they should reach out to individual geoscientists, and other industry professionals, who knew the need for good data storage facility, and were “patriotic” enough to understand that such data should be kept in the country. It was this approach that made Niger Delta Exploration and Production Company, then newly formed and not even yet in producing a single drop of oil, to invest in Petrodata. “It became our biggest single shareholder”.
By now Shebioba had resigned from Shell and joined Adegbola. “We were working on a lot of projects in the QA/QC area.
“Western Geophysical helped us to identify the supply of the racks. They contributed in terms of specifying the standards. Meanwhile, Laide told me that if I was interested I could invest. It was only Shell that had a full functioning data warehouse in-country where it kept most of its data, but the official policy had always been that “anything you have, keep a copy here”.  So there was a market to satisfy. This was 1997/1998”.
Petrodata had still not really taken off. And Shebioba didn’t know then that he would be the one to actually run the company from the formal set-up date. He was only listening into discussions, but he was awed by some of what he discovered. “When I saw the whole proposal, a company that hadn’t even started, you were paying a white boy $12,000 a month. It may have worked, but we lost woefully on our first tender. Shell said we were too expensive. We lost to UK based DPTS. The data was supposed to come here to Nigeria if we had won. 80,000 seismic data tapes were generated when (deepwater) Bonga field was carpeted. There was no company on ground, in Nigeria to store them. Shell warehouse couldn’t. DPTS had amortised their cost. They offered very low cost. But even if we won, the cost of relocation was another matter. 80,000 tapes to relocate to Nigeria.
“So I said: Let us look at the cost again. I volunteered to consult for Petrodata on a part time basis because Petrodata had no money to pay.We moved into this place on the 4th of October 1999.
“All along we said we’d meet international standards-Climate control system, the racks. We didn’t have transcription then; there was no money for that. We were going to get software for data management from Western, but the price was so high we couldn’t afford it.
“We had to specify what we wanted and work with a local. IT specialist Tunde Sowobi developed the tape management software for us. We’ve moved away from what he did, to bigger, internet based inventory of your data online, since then.”
Now that he was involved with Petrodata, Shebioba could see even clearer. “Western Geophysical seconded someone. I knew the man from the field. He was a party manager, not a technical person. He was a mere crew administrator on the field.  Adegbola asked that the man be kicked out and be replaced with a Nigerian personnel.
“I was still part timing here, because I was involved with other projects.
The Nigerian came-He was a technical man before, but in the five years prior to our appointing him, he had been on administrative duties. We had him kicked out too.
In the meantime, Petrodata was heavily marketing itself to the majors in the Nigerian oil industry. Chevron was our first point of call (after the failure to get Shell interested). Chevron benchmarked us with their warehouse in Houston. We were 100% more expensive than that company.  Our cost profile was beginning to look ridiculous, even to ourselves. So we decided to look at the cost structure. Let us present direct costs only; how much does it cost to keep the tapes here. Let us remove overheads, the cost of running the large generators, etc.
We were marketing for six months until Adegbola was able to bring ..Fadeyi, managing director of Pan Ocean Corporation Nigeria, to visit. Until Fadeyi’s visit, everyone who came would say”Nice facility”..and then when they found that no company had entrusted their data with Petrodata, they would not want to be the first.
Fadeyi came, listened to Adegbola’s sales pitch and gave the instruction that the entire Panoco data be moved here. He broke the jinx. Petrodata then went back to the likes of Chevron, to convince them that the cost had been drastically reduced. Chevron agreed, saying they would not relocate their data here. Subsequent acquisition, based on our new cost, would come here. A contract was set up with Chevron; it was the second company to come here. Elf, now Total, was the last of the majors to come here. In Shell, where we had our roots, we spent two and half years in tendering process with Shell. The day I was going to submit the technical tender with Shell was the day Laide Adegbola died. I went to see him in the hospital, to brief him I was going to Port Harcourt.
Adegbola had worked tirelessly on installing a large data centre that will hold oilfield data in Nigeria, outside the premises of the oil companies. He hoped for the making of a national data repository. He didn’t achieve it in his lifetime. But Shebioba went ahead to transform the idea, perhaps in more than the way the promoters envisioned. “ We are the foremost and preferred data storage and management company in Nigeria, we currently work with all the clients and have a capacity of over 750,000 tapes with over 40 tape drives of different vintages”, Shebioba said.
It has been a long way from the NNPC data centre at Falomo, where tapes were stored in poor condition and oil companies began to distrust the idea of keeping all their data locally, in a government owned storage space. The law calls for data to be stored locally. Petrodata is a way of fulfilling the law.
The Company has ventured into services beyond the hydrocarbon industry, “provide workflow solutions and data management services to the banks”.
Petrodata plans to have its permanent site “and be the foremost and preferred storage both physical and digital across all industry for the whole country”.