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UAE committed to oil growth, says Schlumberger GM

Industry

The UAE is committed to increasing oil production to 3.5mn bpd by 2017, according to the general manager and vice president of Schlumberger UAE

Hussein Fouad El Ghazawy spoke to Oil Review Middle East about Schlumberger's commitment to the UAE and what he sees as the main drivers in the UAE market.

El Ghazawy said that the UAE had set itself a significant and challenging plan to increase its oil and gas production by 2017.

"If you add the gas you would be looking at 5mn barrels of equivalent oil and gas by that time," he added.

This ambitious target is the reason behind ADNOC and ADCO's ramping up of additional rigs in Abu Dhabi. Schlumberger has seen a lot of requests for offshore projects in the UAE and he believes the company has the right tools to meet these demands.

"Easy oil is over and we are now after the difficult oil, which will require innovation and technological advancements," stated El Ghazawy.

There are various projects that ADNOC is undertaking on this front, such as the development of sour gas from Shah and the Upper Zakum development project with the four artificial islands.

"On sour gas we have our own technology that can deal with high H2s levels and Co2 content and was developed to meet the rising demand for dealing with sour gas," El Ghazawy said.

We are working with ZADCO on the start up for Upper Zakum integrated services island project while leveraging from our experience on Sakhlin project,” he added.

El Ghazawy explained that Schlumberger was overcoming these new challenges in the oil and gas industry following the opening of the Geoscience and Petroleum Engineering (GPE) centre in Abu Dhabi earlier this year. The consulting hub serves Abu Dhabi, but also caters for the entire region. The centre has four themes: unconventional, exploration, geomechanics and EOR.

"This [centre] will help bring in more technical people from reservoir engineering, geology and petroleum engineering domains to Abu Dhabi, with up to 30 experts in place at any one time," he remarked.

El Ghazawy underlined Schlumberger's commitment to the UAE, which it has operated in for more than 62 years. In 2007 the firm established a Middle East learning centre in Abu Dhabi. Since that time Schlumberger has made a total investment of $200mn, with the 115,000 sqm facility currently able to accommodate up to 700 students. The training centre also accommodates ADNOC and its group of companies' customised training.

Schlumberger has also launched a number of major new technologies to the region in 2012.

"We introduced the PowerDrive Archer high-build rate rotary steerable system (RSS) in the region. It is a unique in this industry where it is a RSS but has the capabilities to build up to 15 degrees, which meets a lot of challenges in this part of the world," El Ghazawy stated.

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