Er­ic Williams, the 52-year-old ex­plo­ration geo­physi­cist and for­mer T&T en­er­gy min­is­ter, did not have to pack his bags and move from Nige­ria to Qatar af­ter all. His nom­i­na­tion for the post of sec­re­tary-gen­er­al of the 11-mem­ber Gas Ex­port­ing Coun­tries' Fo­rum (GECF) was not ac­cept­ed by GECF min­is­ters who make the fi­nal de­ci­sion. But he should not feel too bad­ly about it, say an­a­lysts, be­cause the Russ­ian nom­i­nee Leonid Bokhanovsky, the sec­ond choice, on­ly squeaked in­to the job be­cause of pres­sure from the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment. Moscow want­ed its own man to run the in­ter­na­tion­al or­gan­i­sa­tion deal­ing with the pro­duc­tion and trad­ing of gas, of which Rus­sia is the world's largest re­serves hold­er and biggest pipeline sell­er (T&T is way ahead with ship-borne LNG).

The new sec­re­tary-gen­er­al comes from the pri­vate sec­tor and was vice-pres­i­dent of the Russ­ian en­gi­neer­ing and con­struc­tion group Stroy­transgaz. Williams has so far de­clined to com­ment.

Dis­ap­point­ment

Named af­ter the ar­chi­tect of T&T's in­de­pen­dence and first prime min­is­ter, Williams must ob­vi­ous­ly be dis­ap­point­ed at not be­com­ing the first Trinida­di­an to run an en­er­gy-re­lat­ed in­ter­na­tion­al body.

He had some clear ideas on what he would like to ac­com­plish. He told EN­ER­GY Caribbean be­fore the GECF min­is­ters' Do­ha meet­ing that the job would give him the clout to "do some things dif­fer­ent­ly (at the GECF), and for the gas busi­ness as a whole." For ex­am­ple, some GECF mem­bers are grap­pling with gas wastage through flar­ing, be­cause "mon­eti­sa­tion" op­por­tu­ni­ties have not been grasped. Williams would have been well qual­i­fied to make an im­por­tant con­tri­bu­tion in that area, as a for­mer min­is­ter pro­mot­ing com­mer­cial gas us­age and the mon­eti­sa­tion of a very mod­est proven gas re­serve. "In Nige­ria, they are strug­gling to fig­ure out the modal­i­ties of cap­tur­ing the gas that's be­ing flared," he told us. "There are some vil­lages that didn't even know what night is. Day­light is sun: night is flares." By the Nige­ri­ans' own ad­mis­sion, Williams notes, "they are flar­ing on a dai­ly ba­sis some­thing like half of the 4 bil­lion cu­bic feet a day (bucfd) we mon­e­tise in T&T. That's around 2.0 to 2.5 bncfd."

Nige­ria's gas po­ten­tial

It seems that the in­ter­na­tion­al com­pa­nies which pro­duce Nige­ria's 1.9 mil­lion bar­rels a day (mmbd) of crude oil "nev­er put in place sys­tems to cap­ture the gas, which is main­ly as­so­ci­at­ed gas," Williams notes. "Nige­ria is on­ly now re­quir­ing com­pa­nies to avoid flar­ing gas. They have come out with a gas mas­ter plan which, to some ex­tent, was based on our own mas­ter plan in Trinidad. "The gov­ern­ment has di­vid­ed Nige­ria in­to zones and is try­ing to get pri­vate sec­tor com­pa­nies to bid on putting in the in­fra­struc­ture to move the gas." En­er­gy sec­tor com­pa­nies in T&T are keen to par­tic­i­pate in the Niger­ian gas mon­eti­sa­tion process. The En­er­gy Cham­ber mount­ed a mis­sion to both Nige­ria and Ghana in late 2009 to iden­ti­fy such op­por­tu­ni­ties. The cham­ber mem­bers have wide ex­pe­ri­ence in mon­eti­sa­tion through gas-fu­elled petro­chem­i­cals, gas trans­porta­tion and trad­ing, gas liq­uids ex­trac­tion, plant con­struc­tion and main­te­nance, and gas-based in­dus­tri­al es­tate and port de­vel­op­ment.

Williams in La­gos

Williams was in La­gos when the En­er­gy Cham­ber mis­sion passed through, and is con­vinced that "there are se­ri­ous Niger­ian busi­ness­men who are in­ter­est­ed in part­ner­ing with com­pa­nies in this lit­tle coun­try on the oth­er side of the world that they now know has done ex­tra­or­di­nar­i­ly well with its gas." Williams is like­ly to be asked to help en­er­gy ser­vice providers from T&T as they be­gin to op­er­ate in Africa's most pop­u­lous na­tion (and OPEC's sev­enth largest oil pro­duc­er). Pri­or to ex­press­ing an in­ter­est in be­ing sec­re­tary-gen­er­al of (GECF), Williams was chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer of Afren Nige­ria, a com­pa­ny found­ed by West African oil­men, with its head­quar­ters in Lon­don. Afren Nige­ria is pub­licly quot­ed on the Al­ter­na­tive In­vest­ment Mar­ket (AIM) and has been mov­ing to the main stock ex­change in Lon­don.Afren is very much an ac­tive play­er in the live­ly West African en­er­gy scene, with 20,000 b/d from the off­shore Oko­ro field and an­oth­er 35,000 b/d due to be added by mid-year from the Ebok field.

Williams said Afren has a sec­ond field, Ok­wok, which is ex­pect­ed to as pro­lif­ic as Ebok. Over the next two years, the Afren Nige­ria ex­pects to be adding about 70,000 b/d to our cur­rent pro­duc­tion.

Afren has ex­plo­ration blocks in Ghana, An­go­la and Gabon as well as in the joint eco­nom­ic zone held by Nige­ria/Sao Tome and Principe.

While in Nige­ria, Williams took up the game of golf: his hand­i­cap is 28. He re­called telling friends he'd nev­er play that sil­ly lit­tle game. "Now I do it at least three times a week." Williams is now an in­ter­na­tion­al en­er­gy con­sul­tant and has re­based him­self back in Port-of-Spain, where his moth­er lives.

(Cour­tesy En­er­gy Caribbean)