A refinery safety specialist has won a national technology award in a category that such programmes rarely reach.
Friday Emmanuel Adikwu took the Most Exceptional Refinery Operations and Safety Management Professional of the Year prize at the ninth Nigeria Technology Awards. The award was presented at Virginrose Resorts on Bishop Oluwole Street, Victoria Island, Lagos on the 9th of December 2023.

Adikwu is HSSE Coordinator at Waltersmith Refining and Petrochemical Company Limited, the refining arm of a Waltersmith Group that developed the Ibigwe marginal field in Imo State. He works out of Port Harcourt and was entered in the Tech Individuals and Professional category.

The organisers said his nomination was confirmed in September 2023 and a public voting portal ran through October, with the final decision taken by the programme’s judging panel and advisory board. The awards are run annually by Beta Media Group, which says the programme has recognised more than a thousand individuals and corporate organisations since it began.

Adikwu’s role covers the daily permit to work register for both cold and hot work, process safety inspection of flanges, valves and corrosion points alongside the field operations team, management of change on process plant, and the coordination of confined space entry and lifting operations. He also maintains the inventory of oil spill response equipment and coordinates regulatory inspections and spill activation drills with the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority.

He said the category placement was less unusual than it appeared. “People hear safety and think clipboards,” he said. “A modern refinery runs on instrumented systems, on data from those systems, and on whether the people reading that data know what they are looking at. Refinery safety is a technology problem before it is a paperwork problem. The paperwork is just where the decision gets recorded.”

He added that the recognition belonged to a wider group. “Safety is not delivered by one person standing at the gate,” he said. “It is delivered when the operator on the unit, the contractor on the scaffold and the driver on the access road all understand what they are being asked to do and why it matters.”

Waltersmith was awarded the Ibigwe field on Oil Mining Lease 16 in the Federal Government’s 2003 marginal field licensing round and took over operatorship from the Shell Petroleum Development Company the following year. The field produced its first oil at 500 barrels a day in 2008 and has since reached a peak of 7,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day.

Adikwu holds membership and fellowship of the Nigerian Society of Engineers, the Institute of Safety Professionals of Nigeria, the National Institute of Professional Engineers and Scientists and the Emergency, Crisis and Disaster Risk Management Institute. He has published more than twenty peer reviewed papers on process safety management, industrial fire protection and occupational health risk assessment.