Research and the PTDF 1 — Extending the OSS Model

An enduring leitmotif in the Nigerian oil and gas sector is the almost non-existent transfer of technological knowledge across the various players in the industry. This unwholesome situation and efforts to correct it have become a permanent refrain of this column. Because hydrocarbons are, by their nature, a wasting resource, the most beneficial and enduring asset nations endowed with such resources will be left with when all the wells have dried up will be how these nations are able to coalesce and use for their benefit the scientific and technological knowledge gained over time as a major oil and gas producer.

By Bello Salihu Linkedin Twitter

This article was first Published in November 2012

(Note: This is one of a series of articles I wrote between August 2012 and May 2015 for my weekly column (titled ‘Oil & Gas Weekly’) in the ‘Government’, a weekly magazine published by the Leadership Group (Abuja, Nigeria). The publication targets policy makers as its core readership. These articles were published long before the discovery of oil in the north, the passage of the PIB (now PIA), the transmutation of the NNPC to the NNPCL and the removal of petroleum products subsidy).This is the third instalment on the topic of how the (hopefully) soon-to-be-passed Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) will, or should, impact on Nigeria’s national oil company the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, as regards human capacity building and job creation.

Research and the PTDF 1 — Extending the OSS Model

An enduring leitmotif in the Nigerian oil and gas sector is the almost non-existent transfer of technological knowledge across the various players in the industry. This unwholesome situation and efforts to correct it have become a permanent refrain of this column. Because hydrocarbons are, by their nature, a wasting resource, the most beneficial and enduring asset nations endowed with such resources will be left with when all the wells have dried up will be how these nations are able to coalesce and use for their benefit the scientific and technological knowledge gained over time as a major oil and gas producer. A knowledge transferred across generations and across all facets of the country’s national life that will benefit the citizenry long after there is no oil or gas. Unfortunately most countries in this situation, including Nigeria, focus on the instant gratification of economic rent as against an enduring legacy of building a knowledge-based economy from the exploration and exploitation of their mineral resources.

The most important Nigerian institution solely created to ensure this transfer happens is the Petroleum Technology Development Fund, or PTDF. The PTDF came into being by decree almost forty years ago and until the arrival of the fourth republic was but a desk stuck in a corner in the offices of the Department of Petroleum Resources, DPR. It became a full-fledged parastatal of the Ministry of Petroleum in the year 2000 and since then the fund has been very active in efforts to actualise its mandate, which remains the development and promotion of petroleum technology in Nigeria through the funding of research and training. I have been critical of some specific aspects of the activities of the PTDF but that in itself should not be misconstrued as being either unaware or unappreciative of the fund’s efforts. I joined the industry almost a quarter of a century ago and I was a front-row seat observer of how things were before the PTDF and other similar laudable ideas, such as the Nigerian Content initiative, came into being and changed the landscape for the better. My past discourses on this column relating to the PTDF are but an effort to highlight ways to broaden the opportunities and deepen the gains.

It is in that light that today, and in later articles, I want to share some thoughts as to how the PTDF can achieve a multiplicity of gains from its existing research and scholarship schemes with but a little extra effort and tweaking. The few ideas presented here call for nothing more than building linkages that connect already existing activities that the PTDF is already involved in.

The Overseas Scholarship Scheme (OSS) is one of the activities of the fund that attract a lot of interest from the general public for understandable reasons; it is seen to be conducted with a degree of transparency and the beneficiaries are selected mostly based on merit. The fund then enrols the successful candidates into some of the best technical universities in the Europe. For the candidates, it is a chance to obtain qualifications from some of the most reputable universities in the world. The scheme has both a postgraduate and a research degree component; the former leads to a masters degree and the latter leads to doctoral degree. For the benefit of this discussion we will concentrate on the research degree component.

Let us set the scene by stating that almost all beneficiaries of the PTDF scholarship scheme have no prior experience of working in the field, at least not in oil and gas. For that reason the PTDF needs to request from the foreign beneficiary universities of its scholarship scheme that, as a minimum, its scholars are involved and given measurable tasks and targets in industry-funded research currently under way in those universities. The scholars’ performance and specific achievements in such efforts should be recorded and credited to both the scholar and his or her sponsor, the PTDF. Doing this will expose the scholars to the oil business and provide them with a first step in building a documented career path in the industry. Considering the amount of money paid into these universities by the PTDF, few of them will object to that condition; besides, most will welcome extra hands to thumb the pages of journals and analyse data, past literature or help in building models.

Currently, not all scholars enjoy such privilege and some finish their academic sojourn overseas as ignorant in the ways of the oil and gas industry as they were when they left the shores of Nigeria. Suffice it to say that this remains one of the reasons why after spending so much money in their training, the scholars still struggle to find jobs in the industry. The oil and gas industry has always put more emphasis on experience than on theoretical scholarship.

Having said that, industry involvement in the scholars’ research should be part of the research case the scholars presents to the PTDF even before the scholarship is awarded. There is already research grants awarded by the PTDF to Nigerian scholars to undertake work in specific, identified areas of discipline. It is easy to see that marrying the OSS award to the existing research grants and endowments offered to Nigerian researchers and universities by the PTDF will help the PTDF, the OSS scholar and the local Nigerian researchers in more ways than one.

The PTDF pays tuition, accommodation and a monthly stipend for each of its OSS beneficiary. It also provides flight tickets to and from the country of study at the beginning and end of the study period respectively. Expenses incidental to the student’s research work such as travel and accommodation to attend seminars and workshops are also covered by the PTDF. It is estimated that for each beneficiary in the scheme, the fund spends over ten million Naira annually or thirty million Naira for the the three years the fund estimates are needed to conclude a research degree.

As mentioned above, the PTDF is also active in the award of research grants and endowments to local universities in Nigeria. Just recently the fund announced the award of grants totaling about one hundred and twenty million Naira to six Nigerian researchers, each of whom goes home, or to his laboratory, with about twenty million Naira.

Currently, these two schemes, the OSS and the local research grant, are independent of each other and they neither overlap nor interface; and therein lies the opportunity. Because if the PTDF can take the extra pains of building a linkage between the two and extend such linkage to cover further collaboration with the end users of the research effort, the oil and gas operators in this case, then fewer research efforts will end up as bulky theses gathering dust in libraries.

The newly introduced Split PhD programme by the PTDF goes half-way in addressing this problem. The new programme introduces the means for collaborative research and supervision between Nigerian and foreign universities. By focusing on the actors rather than the subject or topic of the research, this new approach fails a bit short of the ideas expounded here but can be a tweaked to achieve the same goals.

The simple model proposed here takes the shape of basing OSS research funding to knowledge fields rather than individual OSS beneficiaries. A foreign university willing to take on the OSS scholars and a local Nigerian researcher, research group or subject matter expert seeking funding from the PTDF will be encouraged to come together and build a research case for an identified knowledge gap in the industry. Identification of that knowledge gap can be done with the collaboration and participation of the players in the Nigerian energy industry. Once the gap is identified, the scholars are then assigned into the research effort based on their fields of study or research interest. A decision can easily be reached as to who should take supervisory lead between the local and foreign university or research group. This is just a simple example of what is possible, I am sure the PTDF knows their strengths and limitations better and can come up with a much better or more refined version of this back-of-the-napkin overview of the idea.

There exists other models out there that the PTDF can adapt to their peculiar situation. The United Kingdom’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council or EPSRC’s model readily comes to mind. EPSRC’s model is designed to keep the UK at the forefront of global research and innovation and uses a ‘sponsor model’ of research funding in which funding is seen as an investment and not as transfer of funds without obligation. Their current funding plan is designed to go in tandem with efforts of rebuilding the UK economy after the recent financial meltdown. In this situation, and in the case proposed to the PTDF above, money is not just thrown at scholars but targeted to getting something back from the research effort to the research sponsor, PTDF in this case.

The third strategic factor in this synergy is to engage the operators in the industry in identifying the areas they need to have some research undertaken in relation to the their current or future work plan in the country. Oil and gas activities in the country will provide a plenitude of challenges that can be met by a rich and wide field of ideas and rigorous research. Ideas that can be generated by the PTDF research scholars, honed by capable supervision and realised by a research plan that is co-managed by the scholars, their institution of learning or research group and the PTDF all working together.

As things stand now, others are benefitting from the research efforts of the PTDF scholars. A large number of PTDF scholars are undertaking their doctoral studies working on industry-sponsored research topics for which the PTDF has neither input nor control. These topics are suggested to the host universities and funded by an industrial sponsor, normally a global player in the field, in order to gain competitive advantage over other companies. In this arrangement, everybody wins except the PTDF. The university gets funding from both ends; that is from the research sponsor and from PTDF as student tuition, the student gets the knowledge and exposure he or she seeks and the sponsoring company gets its research done. Apart from the odd mention or acknowledgement in the final thesis, the PTDF does not benefit in any way from the results of the research carried out by its scholars. This should change.

In the next installment of this discussion I hope to discuss how effective knowledge management can enhance and extend the gains of research scholarship to the PTDF, the scholar, the Nigerian researcher and the Nigerian oil and gas industry.