May 2006

Olubumni Obembe,
General Manager Supply Chain, Elf Petroleum Nigeria Ltd, and Coordinator of Local Content Strategy in Nigeria

“We’ve been working on local content for a number of years, and existing government guidelines are encouraging us to take things to a new level. Thanks to close cooperation with national oil company NNPC and the experience acquired on earlier projects such as Odudu in 1992, Ofon in 1996 and Akogep I in 2003, we can further increase the Nigerian content of our projects and still meet the technical and sustainable development requirements of local communities. A good example is the Usan field development project, where our local content target is to exceed all previous projects—even though it’s a deepwater development that requires proficiency in complex technologies and extensive industrial resources. The project is currently in the basic engineering phase, and a consortium of local companies partnered with an international contractor is in charge of the technical feasibility study.
For the infrastructure construction phase, our target is that Nigerians—Total and contractor employees combined—will account for 54% of the total hours worked. That’s an ambitious objective that entails involving contractors as far upstream as possible and conducting detailed preliminary evaluations, item by item, of what can be manufactured in Nigeria. For example, we think that local content will account for 39% of the hours worked to build the floating production storage and offloading vessel (FPSO) and 51% to build the topsides. We also use the preimplementation review to determine how the project can make the biggest contribution to developing industrial capabilities and local skills, through training.”