By: Donald V. Watkins
Copyrighted and Published on April 24, 2024
This week, the Republic of Namibia is hosting the Namibia International Energy Conference 2024. Nabirm Energy Services (Pty) Ltd., headquartered in Windhoek, Namibia (West Africa), is one of the privately-owned oil and gas exploration companies invited to attend this prestigious event, which ends on April 25, 2024.
Nabirm CEO Olayinka Arowolo represents his company at this year’s conference.
Also attending this year's conference of power players in the multinational oil and gas business are Halliburton (U.S.), Chevron (U.S.), Exxon Mobile (U.S.), Total Energy (France), Shell (U.K.), Galp (Portugal), and scores of other international oil and geotechnical support companies for the hydrocarbon fuels industry.
Nabirm is the only African/American-African-owned oil and gas company in attendance at this international event. More than 2,000 attendees from 25 oil producing countries are participating in this year’s conference.
In 2011, Olayinka Arowolo and I co-founded Nabirm to explore oil and gas opportunities in Namibia. African-based GRAFFI DBA Investment Holdings (Pty) Ltd. became a Nabirm shareholder in 2014. U.S.-based Horizons, LLC (Huntsville, Alabama), became a shareholder in 2020.
The shareholders of Nabirm believed in turning possibilities into prosperity in oil-rich Namibia. We stayed the course, focused on the flawless execution of Nabirm's business plan, and overcame every obstacle in our path to success.
Nabirm’s offshore oil block in Namibia’s Walvis Bay is surrounded by the major multinational oil companies depicted on the license map depicted below.
Today, Nabirm is focused on the implementation of the geotechnical work required to extract at least 522 million barrels of “unrisked” recoverable Brent crude oil and 583 billion cubic feet of “unrisked” methane natural gas from its assigned offshore oil block in the Walvis Bay on a non-farm out basis.
This is an exciting time for Nabirm, its executive team, shareholders, and their work in the international oil business. In 2011, we reimagined resource-rich Namibia and it is paying off today.
Our journey with Nabirm has been remarkable. Every milestone we have reached as an African-American/Africa-owned oil and gas company has been historic.
On January 16, 2015, Upstream magazine published an article about the completion of Nabirm’s 2D geotechnical program. Upstream is a UK-based trade magazine for the global oil and gas industry. The Upstream article called Nabirm a “minnow” in the oil and gas world.
This week, Nabirm took its rightful place alongside Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Galp, Total Energy, and other major multinational oil and gas companies at the invitation-only Namibia International Energy Conference for 2024.
We are extremely proud of this outstanding achievement for an African-American/African-owned private oil and gas company.
After Nabirm was founded in 2011, we avoided "Red-Flag" people (to the extent possible) and surrounded ourselves with only "Green-Flag" people. We also distanced ourselves from people who suffered from a permanent, self-imposed, inferiority complex. This is the only way to succeed in a multinational industry.