SA Has Adequate Oil and Gas Expertise to Service Africa and Compete with the World |
| The Acting Chief Executive Officer of the South African Oil & Gas Alliance (SAOGA), Mr Adrian Strydom is confident that South Africa has amassed adequate oil and gas expertise that will enable the country to service both Southern Africa and the rest of the world, and sufficient capacity to also compete with the rest of the world’s big players in the sector. Strydom pronounced this view during the official opening of the four-day Africa Oil Week Showcase in Cape Town.
SAOGA forms part of the fifteen local oil and gas companies housed in the South African National Pavilion that is provided by the Department of Trade and Industry (the dti), to profile the country’s oil and gas product offerings during the Africa Oil Week (AOW) Showcase. Strydom outlined that they had been developing capacity in the industry throughout the years, particularly artisans, and had strategically developed capacity in petroleum engineering and petroleum scientists. “We have just completed a tracking study to determine how successful we were in developing our artisans. Amongst a group of 2 000 artisans we had developed from 2017 to date, we went back and surveyed a sample of 160 young people who had been trade tested as artisans to find out how they were doing. We were pleasantly surprised to find that 95% of those artisans were employed. I think that success speaks for volumes regarding our competitive edge,” he said. Strydom also added that SAOGA, which boasts a membership of more than 240 companies that play in the oil and gas related services sector, was firmly in sight of realising its aspirations of developing into an export council. “That is the focus and I feel that we can better achieve our mandate as an export council. At this present moment we are a joint action group that is based in the Western Cape. By being a national organisation we will be able to better serve our members. With an additional sustainability base that comes with being an export council and some of the resources that come with that we will be able to better serve that purpose and serve our industry better. We will also be able to complement what the dti is doing to a greater degree because we can plan ahead in terms of what we do, where we do it and how we do it. I think by being an export council it would make a huge difference in our effectiveness and I believe we can multiply the effect of what we are doing and we can be more streamlined,” said Strydom. The AOW is a leading event for Africa’s upstream oil and gas sector that is attended by more than 1 500 senior oil and gas decision-makers from the oil and gas value-chain that will be seeking to source partners, invest in new suppliers and broker new deals. The 2019 Summit is expected to attract 24 ministers of energy, 20 national oil companies and more than one hundred Chief Executive Officers.
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