With 48 years experience working in the oil and gas and industrial sectors across six continents in multicultural environments, and managing multicultural employees with over 10 of those years spent in Nigeria and Africa, the Chief Operating Officer of Blue Seal Energy Group, Lloyd Robertson, truly understands the marketplace, client’s needs, the business drivers and how to be successful. In this exclusive interaction with Peter Uzoho, Robertson shares his experiences, the company’s investment in Nigeria as well as future plans. Excerpts: Blue Seal Energy Group is into the manufacturing of chemical products that serve the oil and gas and other industrial sectors. How has the experience been working in Nigeria and leading this company as the Chief Operating Officer? Well, it’s interesting because I have substantial previous experience in Nigeria. This is not my first experience. My first experience in Nigeria was as district manager in Warri in 1988 for Baker Hughes. And then I left, because Baker Hughes was going through a merger and acquisition, and they hadn’t decided how they were going to structure the the company. I left and went to Papua New Guinea for two years, seconded to Chevron, and then they asked me to come back in 1990 as the technical manager for all of Nigeria, and I was in Port Harcourt for four years. Then I was transferred to other places around the world. I went from Nigeria to Tunisia, Tunisia to Indonesia, from Indonesia to Aberdeen, Scotland, from Aberdeen, Scotland to Luanda, Angola as sub-sahara region manager. And they transferred the regional office from Luanda to Lagos. And I came back to Lagos as managing director of Baker Hughes in Nigeria, as well as holding the responsibility for Sub-Saharan region drilling fluids manager. So I am quite comfortable with the Nigerian environment. I know it well. Blue Seal opened its chemical manufacturing plant sometime last year. What is the business like now with the company since the commissioning of the facility? Well, we are just getting started, really. I mean, we’ve had some delays in production due to some conflicts within the organization. We’re about to get to the point where we will be doing full production in the very near future. Market dynamics have been a major driver in our slow start. But we look forward to establish our foundation and grow. And I think our growth will be very quickly. Blue Seal’s plant in Ibeju-Lekki has the capacity of about 35 million metric tonnes per annum. Have you now ramped up to 100 per cent production capacity, as we speak? No, not yet. As I said, we’re starting slowly. The capacity of the plant is 1.7 million liters per day. So we can do substantially more than what you have just stated. However, And one thing I need to say going forward is that we are not competing with the people who are the end users. We want to be collaborators with the end users who need those products. The service companies that have long-term relationships with the operators in Nigeria, we want to support them. We want to be there OEM reguonal manufacturer. So we are reaching out to those companies that need our support. And trying to break through to make them more efficient economically. And to give them the inventory they need in a just-in-time manner, rather than having to order and wait for it to ship and be cleared and to be in their warehouse. Because I’ve managed investors in Nigeria, I know that when I first came to Nigeria, that from the time you ordered product to the time it was in your warehouse, it could take as long as five to six months. We were able to improve that efficiency slightly, but we never got to a point where it was over four turns of inventory in a year. With the capabilities of manufacturing in Nigeria, you can bring that inventory turns to a matter of nine or 10 turns of inventory in a year on the products that we make. Our plans are to expand our manufacturing capability to a point where we can provide more of the products they need, to substantially help their return on net capital employed and, then profitability. All of our products are made to international quality standards, according to API, according to ISO. So when we bring our products to the marketplace, we stand behind our products from a quality standard, making sure that they are not losing anything if they buy from us rather than importing. Who are your major clients or customers in Nigeria, across the oil and gas, and industrial sectors? Our primary targets as clients are the drilling fluids companies, the production chemistry companies, the turnkey operators who provide the services to the major operators. Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Fertiliser are there in Ibeju-Lekki as your neighbours and I know they too require some chemical supplies to work. Are you into any contracts with them? Are you supplying t
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