By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
Sierra Leone Petroleum Directorate has said it is now in a better capacity to collect, interpret and analyse data of oil deposits in the country, as a result of its latest acquisition of advance information technology tools.
The directorate recently benefitted from a multi-million-dollar project by the World Bank which is supporting the extractive industry in the country. The Extractive Industries Assistance Project Phase 2 (EITAP) facilitated the purchase and setting up of eight dual screen computer work stations, the purchase and update of geological software and the training of staff.
The Director General of the Sierra Leone Petroleum Directorate, Timothy Kabba told Politico that the upgrade has placed them in a better position to give more precise data to potential clients in the Oil and Gas industry.
Kabba said: “The software helps us build models which we will use to explain better to clients that will want to start exploration in Sierra Leone.”
“Oil and gas is a very technical sector, so there is also a need to build the capacity of our staff,” he added.
Kabba spoke to Politico during a press briefing on Monday following an inspection of the newly installed facilities.
Earlier, Mustapha Sheku Gibril, Ccordinator of the World Bank supported project, told journalists that the support is part of a more comprehensive program aimed at enhancing the extractive industry in the country.
“We have institutions that one way or the other play a vital role in the management of the extractive industry. The Petroleum Directorate is one of them and that is why we have been supporting them,” Gibril said.
“Under the phase 1 of the project, the EPA, NRA and SLEITI have all been beneficiaries of the project” he added.
The Petroleum Directorate is currently receiving bids from companies for offshore drilling in the country. The technology tools will now give them a better insight on assessing and recommending the best possible locations of oil deposits and drilling techniques.
In a demonstration of how the newly installed tools work, Petroleum Geologist, Masa Bah said their capacity will now allow them to interpret a huge volume of data over a short period of time.
“We have been able to do structural interpretation of well and seismic data. With the software we can track the deposit of sediments to determine the volume of oil.”
And, added DG Kabba: “If we say we have discovered oil, we need to be able to know the volume.”
Despite the major push this IT upgrade has given them, the directorate says it will still need more. The Head of IT, Musa Aziz Yokie said there is need for them to increase their storage capacity to handle more data.
“The IT is the backbone of what happens here. What we deal with here takes so much data space in terms of graphics and processing power. We don’t deal with Gigabytes, we deal with Terabytes (TB),” Yokie said.
Whiles explaining to the World Bank, Hafiz Pussah, the IT Systems Administrator at the Directorate, said currently they need more than ten times the current fold of data storage space they have.
“The storage capacity of this server is 10TB. What we have in house is over 150TB. So, for now we use these two severs and create virtual servers in them to accommodate more space,” Pussah said.
“Right now, our Geologists can’t even open a new project because of space. They have to work within the old one,” he added.
The IT department says the severs and the power source which are lead batteries, have already ran their life span of three years. Yokie said the need to replace the. equipment is urgent.
“We are afraid that one day these machines will just crash because they have run through their life span. With the servers, the need to go virtual is urgent. We also need to replace the batteries. We have no idea when it will suddenly stop,” he said.
A potential crash of the server could halt the operations of the directorate at a crucial time.
The Project Manager said he was pleased with how much the directorate has achieved with what they have been given. Gibril said he will call on the World Bank for more support.
He said: “What we have provided for them is fit for purpose. So, going forward we will prevail on World Bank to intervene in other areas. We are impressed so far with what we have seen.”
Sierra Leone Petroleum Directorate is the principal body responsible to regulate the oil and gas industry in the country; this includes negotiating terms of license, monitoring and the facilitation of all petroleum upstream activities on behalf of the country.
© 2019 Politico Online
