Skills shortage may slow Africa oil growth

Africa, an increasing supplier of global energy, may be unable to expand its output as fast as expected in coming years due to a shortage of industry skills.

Inadequate schools and relative poverty mean Africa is badly placed to compete for the expertise it will need to develop new fields, a situation only made worse by a wider international shortage of oil and gas engineers and geologists, analysts say.

Will that affect the pace of new oil coming onstream?
“Absolutely. That’s going to be the issue. That’s one of the main depressive themes for (Africa’s oil) development,” said Robert Taylor, business development manager for IHRDC, an energy industry training and consulting company.

“Nobody’s talking about it in Africa. What they’re talking about is creating jobs generally. But creating something like a petroleum engineer takes 10 years. As they start developing the big fields, you don’t just go create a petroleum engineer job.”

The United States already receives about 15 percent of its oil imports from Africa’s Gulf of Guinea region. Analysts predict this may rise to 25 percent by 2015. Additional amounts come from Algeria and Libya.

Reuters