Chinese technology giant Huawei has said that its mission in Nigeria is to enable the digitisation of all industries in the country, with a focus on the oil and gas industry.
This was shared by one of Huawei’s Energy Account Directors, Raymond Wang, at the Nigeria International Petroleum Summit 2021, where the firm’s representatives showed how it planned to digitise the oil and gas business in Nigeria.
Representatives from the Nigerian Government present at the exhibition include the Group Managing Director of NNPC, Mele Kyari; the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva; and the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Petroleum Resources, Bitrus Bako Nabasu.
Wang noted that the firm sought to “speed up oil search and improve oil search accuracy, increase production and reduce costs, monitor oil depot data to reduce oil stealing and oil leakage.
With emerging trends like Big Data, IoT, AI, 5G and Cloud, Oil & Gas industry players can improve oil well drilling efficiency and HSE management.
“Huawei’s mission is to promote digital transformation and reduce the digital gap across all industries.
“For the Oil & Gas industry in Nigeria, we have several targets such as; improving production by about five per cent to boost revenue and the GDP; HSE can be greatly improved to reduce accidents for a safer and more secure Oilfield; O&M cost can be reduced each year to 15 Million in total; Visualization, Monitoring and Security Management of Pipeline and Full process of Oil Depot; Curbing of vandalism and Oil leakage for Oil Pipelines by providing innovative solutions which can monitor illegal operations in Oil Depot, thereby significantly reducing oil tampering; Ensure the E&P processing speed will be reduced from the average hourly level to the minute level; Improve E&P processing accuracy, that is, E&P Data processing error rate will be reduced from an average of 10 per cent to two per cent; help E&P companies to find oil more accurately and faster to realize Data to Barrel.”
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Huawei and Security Risks
Under the Trump administration, Huawei’s operations in the United States have been a subject of intense scrutiny alongside other Chinese companies accused of spying on the US Government.
Huawei was added to the ‘Entity List’ by the Commerce Department after former President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning the use of digital equipment of foreign firms, as he said that they posed a national security risk.
The Entity List restricts Huawei’s business dealings with US companies like Google, leading to Huawei phones with pre-installed Google applications becoming unsellable in the US or anywhere.
Other nations followed suit in examining the dealings of the Chinese tech firm in their tech business space.
The US ban effectively stunted the growth the company had projected for 2019 when it was expected to overtake Samsung as the world’s largest smartphone maker.
