LADOL boss canvasses quality, efficient service delivery among logistics providers

Logistics service providers in the nation’s oil and gas sector have been urged to take advantage of the falling oil pric es in the international market to improve their potentials of providing the logistics needs of oil majors operating in the country.

The advice was made by Amy Jadesimi, managing director of the Lagos Deep Offshore Logistics (LADOL), who maintained that rather than grief over the price fall, that logistics service provider should see it as time to harness the attendant opportunities offered by the development for the interest of the economy.

Jadesimi, a former investment banker, is hoping that renewed pressure on oil majors to cut costs will spur oil majors to take advantage of logistics base developed in-country to serve a projected boom in deepwater oil production.

Oil companies, she states, needs a base in Lagos for deep offshore production and drilling support, hence the birth of LADOL. “Many believe that it’s more efficient, but they haven’t made the move because economically there wasn’t enough incentive.”

According to her, Nigeria’s hopes of significantly boosting its oil exports which is currently about 2.1 million barrels per day, rest on expanding a fleet of giant floating production platforms similar to Bonga vessel operated by Royal Dutch Shell.

“The advent of local content law in Nigeria has reversed the long lost hope of indigenous participation in the country’s oil and gas sector, such that all that is needed now is for the government not to yield to the quest of certain groups who were out to impose monopoly in the industry,” she explained.
Industry critics have often pointed out that ever since the first commercial oil discovery in Nigeria in 1956, oil majors such as Shell, Chevron and

Total have taken the lead in building Africa’s largest oil industry while local companies struggled to muster the expertise, technology and capital to compete.

Jadesimi however argued that the passage of the Local Content Act in 2010 has given a boost to local businesses by requiring international oil companies to increase their reliance on Nigerian staff and services. Oil companies, she said, have also increasingly been able to acquire assets such as oilfields and tap into international capital markets to finance projects.

She added that LADOL, which models itself as an exemplar of this trend has developed a facility that offers specialist engineering, manufacturing, port and shipbuilding services needed to support ambitious deepwater projects in the Sub-region. “The company has spent more than $400 million to develop its base at Apapa, near Lagos port, as it now counts Nigerian and international oil companies among its client. For the oil majors to start using LADOL as a logistics base is now a question of time.”

Hitherto, most oil majors rely on engineering support facilities in the Niger Delta, where oil was first discovered to carry out much of their services, but Jadesimi says LADOL is specifically configured to support a new generation of drilling projects in fields far out to sea.
Like other Nigerian investors, she is hoping the new administration of President Muhammadu Buhari will encourage greater Nigerian participation in the oil industry by ensuring strict implementation of the Local Content Act.

“We need to strategise and make sure we are focusing our investment on areas that are going to reap the biggest reward, both in terms of profitability for our shareholders and job creation for Nigerians,” she says.