Oghogho Effiom Will Take Over from Iledare as SPE’s Africa Director

By Moremi Mthembu, in Cape Town

The Nigerian geologist, Oghogho Effiom, has been elected Africa Regional Director of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) for 2022.

She has five months to take over from Wumi Iledare, a Nigerian reservoir engineer and professor of petroleum economics, whose term ends in September 2021.

The baton exchange will be a generational handover.

As far back as 42 years ago (1979), Iledare had graduated and was reservoir/production engineer trainee with Mobil Producing Nigeria. In contrast, Mrs. Effiom is 41.

The regional director-in-waiting “is a senior development planner for Shell Nigeria, where she enables integration between all disciplines to ensure consistencies across projects regarding development concepts, scenarios, and decisions”, the SPE says in a statement. She formerly was a senior production geologist with the AngloDutch major.

Effiom was the 2020 chair of the SPE Lagos Section, winning the 2020 Presidential Award for the section. In 2019, she received the SPE African Regional Service Award. She served as chair of the 2018 Nigerian Annual International Conference and Exhibition, and the 2016 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition Soft Skills Workshop on Strategic Planning.

Effiom holds a master’s degree in asset integrity management from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen and a bachelor’s degree in geology from the University of Benin in Nigeria.