Developing National Talent to Meet Future Production Opportunities in Egypt

Abstract

The Badr El-Din Petroleum Company ("Bapetco") has always invested in developing the competency of its field and well operations staff with significant success achieved over the last 25 years of operations. Growing Bapetco's and Egypt's National talent resource is essential to continuously improve operational excellence in all activities and to implement advanced technologies to sustain and increase production. Historically, competency development was supported by a combination of on-the-job training and formal classroom training programmes. These competency development methods have been augmented over recent years by blended learning techniques and formal competency assessment to recognise and reward achievement of levels of skills and experience within a formal mentoring and accreditation framework. This paper details the remarkable progress made so far and Bapetco's approach to achieving a sustainable and internationally recognised competency development programme for well and field operational personnel in Egypt, and beyond. The paper describes what has so far been achieved and what initiatives are underway to ensure that Bapetco's and Egypt's current and future competency requirements in the well and field operations domain are met. Results/Conclusions - The Bapetco Wells section, i.e. Well Engineering (WE) and Completions & Well Interventions (C&WI) discipline has always been supported by internationally recognised accredited competency development programme (Shell's Drilling Round I and II). This has supported Bapetco business aims and led to a doubling of the number of drilling rigs supervised by qualified National Drilling Supervisors, and recognition of Bapetco for its international accreditation of its first Well Services Supervisors. This has also benefitted the Egyptian oil and gas sector by supplying the Well Engineering and Well Services discipline with a steady stream of qualified engineers. Graduate engineers benefit greatly from progressive competency development, thorough blended learning, and professional accreditation to attain progressive competency profiles. The benefits of this approach have been identified and the drive is to continue to extend the development and accreditation programmes across the Wellservices and Field Operations disciplines to make sure that National talent is groomed professionally to take on the leadership of Bapetco's future oil and gas developments, and make an important contribution to the wider Egyptian oil and gas sector.