All articles in the Petroleum People Section:

Senegalese President Bassirou  Faye inaugurated the first hydrocarbon production in two significant projects within the first year of his taking office.

The 100,000Barrels of Oil Per Day (BOPD) Sangomar oil and gas field and the 2.5Million Tonne Per year (MMTPA) Greater Tortue-Ahmeyin Liquefied Natural Gas project, are large sized resource extraction campaigns for Senegal.

With these accomplishments, Mr. Faye could be excused for trusting that the leadership of the regional council of Presidents was his for the taking.

Now, his loss of the election of the ECOWAS Presidency to Sierra Leone’s Julius Maada Bio is being cast in the Francophone African orbit as a continuation of the side-lining of French speaking states in the affairs of the West African sub-region.

Faye, who swept into power in his country in early 2024, went to Abuja, Nigeria in June 21, 2025 certain that he would take the chairmanship of the West African organisation after Nigeria’s Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

But after 24 hours of closed-door electioneering, Faye had lost to Sierra Leone’s Julius Maada Bio.

That the new chairman (coming after Ghana’s Nana Akufo-Addo and Nigeria’s Tinubu),  is the third chairman in a row from an English speaking country, is considered significant injury to the French speaking bloc.

The last French-speaking leader to hold the position of was Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger, who was appointed in 2019.

Mr Faye’s chances of winning were reduced by the absence of President Alassane Ouattara of  Côte d’Ivoire and President Faure Gnassingbé of  Togo.

The Canadian engineer, Cheryl Sandercock has been appointed Chairman of the board of directors of  Meren Energy, replacing John Craig who stepped down immediately..

“Mr. Craig, a Director of the Company since 2009, had informed the Board of his intention to step down last year and the appointment of Ms. Sandercock follows a recruitment process that was initiated earlier this year”, Meren said in a statement.

Meren Energy Inc. was formerly known as Africa Oil Corp. and changed its name to Meren Energy Inc. in May 2025.

Meren Energy holds interests in Agbami and Egina oil and gas fields, the second and third largest producing deepwater accumulations offshore Nigeria. It also holds equity in the Akpo field. All of these benefit from low lifting costs, premium Brent pricing and a favourable fiscal regime.

“Ms. Sandercock is a highly experienced energy professional, having served as the Co-Head of Acquisitions and Divestitures in the Energy Advisory Investment Banking practice of BMO Capital Markets”, Meren says in a note.

“She has advised on over $70Billion in transactions, including acquisitions, divestitures, mergers, farm-ins, equity raises, joint ventures for public and private companies, NOCs, and private equity investors.  Ms. Sandercock’s prior experience includes another large Canadian international bank, independent reserve and resource assessments, and technical roles in drilling & completions, reservoir, production, development and gas storage engineering as well as field operations for an oil & gas exploration and production company”.

Ms. Sandercock attended the Schulich School of Engineering at the University of Calgary, Canada, earning a B.Sc. in Chemical and Petroleum Engineering.  She is a professional engineer registered with the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA) and holds the ICD.D designation from the Institute of Corporate Directors in Canada.

By Toyin Akinosho

Kenny Ladipo’s father asked him “What the hell is geology all about”?

And he did not have an answer, he told me, “except that my uncle, brother Johnson Ladipo, was one of the first set of geology students at the University of Ibadan. But he died in his second year, and that was the first time in my life that someone, the demise of someone close to me, left an impact on me.

“That, you could say, was one of my first defining moments”.

For all Ladipo’s widely acknowledged reticence among his peers and measured responses to questions in this interview, this revelation about courage of conviction, early in his life, came across as charming.  I pressed him further on his obstinacy.

“There was no other reason. Some things click inside you and they don’t leave you. That’s one of the characteristics of what you can say are defining moments. You are not in control, you don’t fully understand”.

Support for the young lad came by way of intervention from Mr. Famuroti, the then principal of Methodist Boys High School (MBHS) on the Marina in Lagos, Nigeria, who would go on to become a titled traditional chief. Famuroti’s wife, like Ladipo’s Dad, was a nurse.

“When the Chief returned from the United States, having done his masters in mathematics, the two families became even closer, and he moved to the MBHS staff court, the principal’s quarters on the Marina and he said to my Dad, ‘look, why do you want to force him to read medicine? Because you want to have a medical doctor as a son? Let him do what he wants to do’, and my father gave up and allowed me to read geology. And I never regretted”.

That episode, 55 years ago, turned out to be the first of several such moments of decision that led inexorably to Ladipo’s receipt of the Aret Adams award, the highest honour bestowed by the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists (NAPE), on any of its members, in Lagos in November 2024.

Armed with the knowledge that Ladipo was a keen observer of how the sea transgresses and regresses, it occurred to me to ask him what he thought about the fact that though over 4,000kilometres apart,  the Cape Town event at which he was proclaimed an “icon of the industry” in 2015 and the Lagos conference at which he received the AAA, happened in venues located less than two miles away from the same water body: the south Atlantic.

But I let it pass.

GRADUATING AS ONE OF THE TOP of his class at the (then) prestigious University of Ibadan in southwestern Nigeria, the second surprise in his life, by Ladipo’s own reckoning, was the invitation by the Gulf Oil Company of Nigeria (now Chevron Nigeria Ltd) to a final interview, as part of a select group of the best five students from all geology departments in Universities which offered geoscience courses the country. “Over five days, they took us through series of interviews, and five of us were employed. So by the time I finished my NYSC in 1976, I already got a job”.

One of Ladipo’s biggest disappointments when he arrived to start work at Chevron was that the expatriate (mostly American) geoscientists working for the company all had doctorate degrees, whereas the Nigerians didn’t. “If you went into this room, you’d see Doctor Reed, if you moved on to that room, you’d see Doctor Carport, but the next room to each of them was occupied by Mister this Nigerian, Mister that Nigerian. I told myself that this could never be a level playing field. And it was going to be very difficult to compete. Something just told me, ‘Kenny, this is not for you’. So, I quit in December 1976, to the disappointment of many Nigerians at the company, including Mrs. Ibilola Femi Pearce, who was the HR manager then, and she called me into her room and said: ‘Kehinde, you are going to disappoint a lot of us, because out of your set, you are the top most rated’. So, I told her: ‘Madam, this is not going to be a level playing field, and you either play pranks, tricks or whatever. I told her I was going back and if the door was still open three to four years’ time, I’d have my doctorate and I could compete with these American guys”.

Ladipo’s father held up his hands in surprise, of course.

“My father asked me, again: ‘Why are you dropping a very well paid job, and your salary is dropping by about 60%?’

“I looked at him, I said, ‘but you wanted me to be a medical doctor. I’m going to add doctorate to my title. Just give me a short while’.

“So he drove me in his Toyota Corolla station wagon to Ilorin, in December, 1976, to go and resume work” as one of the foundation staff at what was then a one-year old Federal University in the middle of the country.

In five months, Ladipo had moved from a trainee geologist in a Fortune 100, multinational company to a Graduate Assistant in a brand new University with no clearly defined future. But the story had not even started.

At this point in our conversation,  the stately, sandy haired  Temitayo;  Ladipo’s wife and close partner of 49 years standing, looked in the door and beckoned to him.

We had been summoned.

OVER LUNCH OF RICE AND DODO and fresh croaker fish, probably harvested from the lagoon around the corner, Ladipo told me how he detoured from Engineering Geology to Sedimentology. Read the full story here.

Nicolas Foucart, the Belgian citizen who is Managing Director of NNPC E&P Ltd (formerly NPDC), is talking up the possibility of growing the company’s gross output by 170,000Barrels Per Day of oil and condensate in three to four years, but can he do it?

It is the first time a Non Nigeran is holding the reins of a technically oriented, upstream asset- holding, arm of the NNPC..

The former executive of Spanish player Repsol, who was appointed to his current role 17 months ago, says that NEPL’s ambition is  to increase output to 373,000BPD in 2025 and to bolster those figures to 550,000BPD by 2029.

“65% of that volume is NEPL’s share”, Foucart explains.

Foucart talks of four pillars of a strategic roadmap which, apart from “increasing and sustaining production, includes cost optimization, decarburization and people development.

Although Foucart claims that he gross NEPL output has grown from 244,000BPD to 310,000BOPD in the last one year, it is easy to be skeptical about the increase he is proposing, going by NEPL (NPDC)’s antecedents.

Foucart, who had spent over 22 years in Repsol in various engineering and managerial roles on three continents, was handed the job of running the Exploration and Production subsidiary of NNPC Ltd, after years of stagnating production and several sub-performing JV partnerships

He got into the NNPC Group system as Chief Operating Officer (COO) of NNPC Exploration and Production Limited (NEPL), the company formerly known as NPDC. Now he has been confirmed Chief Executive Officer of that subsidiary, after the retirement of Ali Zarah.

The 37 year old NEPL has majority stakes in seven (crude oil and gas) producing Joint Ventures in 12 Oil Mining Leases (OMLs). It also holds 100% in eight producing OMLs. The most performing  of the company’s assets, however,  are the JVs that are operated by other companies as well assets in which NEPL is in  joint operating mode with other parties These are Seplat operated OMLs 4, 38 & 41; Oando operated OMLs 60, 61, 62 & 63; Heritage operated OML 30 as well as OMLs jointly operated, such as OML 40 (with Elcrest), OML 34 (with NDWestern), OML 26 (with FHN) and OML 42, run as FTSA with Neconde. These OMLs, which have strong private sector input, are the best performing in NEPL’s portfolio. The least performing  assets in NEPL’s  basket of assets are those acreages in which NEPL has a 100% holding. Considering that NEPL’s solely held assets have large hydrocarbon reserves of their own, (over 650Million barrels of crude, according to NNPC’s own data), Mr. Foucart’s call is  to turbocharge the company’s operational efficiency and deliver over 100,000Barrels per day of crude from these largely idle assets into the market. From the figures we have, those eight producing OMLs in which NEPL is the 100% owner are desperately struggling with under-optimisation.   There has been stagnation in the planned redevelopment of the Okono-Okpoho fields in OML 119, an asset widely known in the industry as having far more significant upside (deeper pools discovered and left undeveloped, untested fault blocks) than the 10,000BOPD it is currently doing; NEPL has largely left the production in OMLs 86 & 88, which it purchased  from Chevron in 2021, to dwindle.  There has been no uplift in OML 98, which was handed to NEPL after revocation from Pan Ocean in 2019.

Mr. Foucart is not shy of admitting there have been challenges. “We looked at historical performances”, he said at the Nigerian International Energy Summit in late February 2025, “and identified the root of underperformance”. The company, he said, looked for enablers and set up a transformation programme, coordinated from a transformation office.

Foucart repeated the need for accessing funding for the turnaround. “We want to give confidence to shareholders”, he repeated several times in the course of three minutes.

Out of the FTSA (Finance and Technical Sales Agreement) that NEPL has signed with four companies on four acreages in the last six years, only the SEEPCO managed OML 13 , has delivered any significant uplift. The WAGL (Sahara subsidiary) which manages OML 11, an asset withdrawn from Shell in 2019, has added nary a drop. And there is no clarity about the status of the redevelopment of the Abura field in OML 65, for which FTSA was signed with CMES–OMS Petroleum Development Company (COPDC) Limited, as far back as six years ago.

Foucart has been around the oilpatch since  he took a civil engineering degree in ULB Université Libre de Bruxelles in 1993 and followed it up with  MSc, Offshore Engineering from the University Newcastle upon Tyne in 1994. He has been project engineer, asset manager and construction engineer in Algeria for Repsol; he has worked as production engineering manager in Spain; he’s been project manager in Bolivia and director in Columbia He has been Repsol’s point man as General Manager in Venezuela and has worked as Cost Efficiency director in Madrid. In his LinkedIn Page he repeats: “Business Process Improvement a lot as core skill.

“His distinct advantage is that he is not a Nigerian”, one NEPL manager says of Foucart, on the condition of anonymity, “so he focuses on performance and job delivery rather than running after contracts”. The structure of NNPC is such that NEPL, as a subsidiary, doesn’t initiate field development projects all on its own. That is the remit of the GCEO, at the group level. But there are several abandoned projects in the in NEPL portfolio. The Okono-Okphoho redevelopment is one. Gas extraction in OML 98 is another.  And the FTSA with Sahara in OM 11 is an epic struggle. Mr. Foucart can at least focus on timeous completion of projects on ground.

By Lukman Abolade

Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has appointed Bashir Bayo Ojulari as the new Group Managing Director (GMD) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), replacing Mele Kyari after over five-year tenure.

This announcement was made in a statement released early Wednesday by the President’s Special Adviser on Information & Strategy, Bayo Onanuga.

As part of the reshuffle, the President also reconstituted the NNPCL board, appointing Ahmadu Musa Kida as the non-executive chairman to succeed Chief Pius Akinyelure. The new 11-member board now includes Ojulari as Group CEO, Kida as non-executive chairman, and Adedapo Segun, who was appointed to the board after replacing Umaru Isa Ajiya as chief financial officer in November.

The reshuffled board features six non-executive directors, each representing Nigeria’s geopolitical zones:

• Bello Rabiu (North West): With a career spanning 28 years at NNPC, Rabiu retired as the Chief Operating Officer/Group Executive Director of the Upstream Business Unit in 2019. He holds advanced degrees in Mathematical Statistics and Petroleum Engineering.
• Babs Omotowa (North Central): An international leader in the energy industry with over 26 years of experience across multiple continents. He served as Managing Director/CEO of Nigeria LNG Limited from 2011 to 2016 and has held various executive roles at Shell.
• Austin Avuru (South South): Founder and Executive Chairman of AA Holdings, Avuru co-founded Seplat Petroleum Development Company Plc and served as its CEO from 2010 to 2020. Under his leadership, Seplat achieved dual listing on the London and Nigerian Stock Exchanges.
• David Ige (South West): Founder and CEO of GasInvest Limited, Ige has over 23 years of industry experience. He was the Group Executive Director for Gas & Power at NNPC between 2011 and 2015 and played a pivotal role in developing Nigeria’s gas policies.
• ​Henry Obih (South East): Former Group Executive Director/Chief Operating Officer for NNPC’s Downstream Operations with a 22-year career at Mobil Oil Nigeria.
• Yusuf Usman (North East).

Mrs. Lydia Shehu Jafiya, Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Finance, will represent the ministry on the new board, while Aminu Said Ahmed will represent the Ministry of Petroleum Resources.

Who is the New NNPC GMD?

Before his appointment, Ojulari, hailing from Kwara State, was the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Renaissance Africa Energy Company, which recently led a consortium of indigenous energy firms in the $2.4 billion acquisition of Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC). Ojulari holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.

Ojulari’s career in the oil sector began with Elf Aquitaine, where he became the first Nigerian process engineer. He joined Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria in 1991 as an associate production technologist.

His career spans work in Nigeria, Europe, and the Middle East, where he held roles as a petroleum process and production engineer, strategic planner, field developer, and asset manager. He served as General Manager of Development at SPDC and later became Managing Director of Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company (SNEPCO), retiring in July 2021.

Apart from working in Nigeria, he worked in Europe and the Middle East in different capacities as a petroleum process and production engineer, strategic planner, field developer, and asset manager. He served in various capacities at SPDC, including General Manager, Development,

In 2015, he became the managing director of Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company (SNEPCO) and retired from the position in July 31 2021.

During his career, he was chairman and member of the board of trustees of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE Nigerian Council), was SPE Nigeria Council Chairman in 1998/99 and a fellow of the Nigerian Society of Engineers.

Ojulari has always credited his impact in the drive towards Well Reservoir and Facility Management (WRFM) between 2005 and 2006 in Nigeria, and the major transformation while on international assignment in PDO Oman, that generated a 50% reduction in life cycle cost, as key landmarks of his career.

Ahmadu Musa Kida?

Like Ojulari, Musa, the new board chairman, from Borno State is also an alumnus of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, where he received a degree in civil engineering in 1984. He also obtained a postgraduate diploma in petroleum engineering from the Institut Francaise du Petrol (IFP) in Paris, France.

He started his career in the oil industry at Elf Petroleum Nigeria and later joined Total Exploration and Production as a trainee engineer in 1985.

Musa became Total Nigeria’s Deputy Managing Director of DeepWater Services in 2015. Last year, he became an Independent Non-Executive Director at Pan Ocean-Newcross Group.

Apart from his oil industry career, Ahmadu Musa Kida is a former basketballer and the president of the Nigerian Basketball Federation (NBBF) board.

What is the target?

President Bola Tinubu has outlined ambitious targets for the newly appointed leadership of NNPCL. The primary objective is to conduct a comprehensive review of NNPC-operated and Joint Venture assets, ensuring alignment with the company’s value maximization strategy.

NNPCL is also set to drive substantial investment growth, with targets of $30Billion by 2027 and $60Billion by 2030.

On the production front, the leadership is tasked with ramping up oil production to 2Million barrels per day by 2027, with a further increase to 3Million barrels per day by 2030. Gas production is also a focal point, with a target of 8Billion cubic feet per day by 2027 and 10 billion cubic feet per day by 2030.

Additionally, President Tinubu has set a goal for NNPC to significantly increase its share of crude oil refining, targeting 200,000 barrels per day by 2027 and 500,000 barrels per day by 2030.

Challenges Under Kyari’s Leadership

Kyari’s tenure as GMD saw several unmet promises and challenges. Notable among them was the failure to launch the Initial Public Offering (IPO) for NNPCL as mandated by the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA). Under his leadership, oil production from joint ventures also declined, and critical infrastructure projects such as the OB3 pipeline, which is key to major gas projects and investments, faced significant delays. The ANOH gas facility, despite being completed, has remained idle due to these infrastructural challenges. Despite repeated assurances, Kyari’s leadership ended without the realization of several key initiatives, leaving a significant gap in meeting the country’s oil sector’s potential.