Jamil DAHBOUR
General Manager
SPECIALIST OILFIELD SERVICES

Strength in partnership

Kuwait

Jamil Dahbour, general manager of Specialist Oilfield Services, talks to The Energy Year about the company’s main activities and its decision to choose companies as potential partners. Specialist Oilfield Services is a Kuwait-owned engineering services company, providing engineering support services primarily to the upstream and downstream oil sectors and petrochemical industry.

What are the current main activities of SOS?
The company is widely recognised in Kuwait due to its history, highly qualified staff, technicians and engineers, and well-equipped facilities. With our experience, we play an important role in the current offshore drilling campaign, providing offshore partners with API certification for Blowout preventers (BOPs). In addition, we are ideally positioned to further expand our operations.
All of the drilling rigs in Kuwait are getting old, and we will soon need to participate in their reactivation to make them operational again. This is a huge opportunity for a company like ours, which holds and provides six API certifications. For this reason, we are contacting some companies to create joint ventures and expand our service line, with the goal of adding to our API certification portfolio the provision of rig certifications, which no company in Kuwait offers yet.
Through this potential partnership, we are also looking to increase the number of our employees from 85-90 to 200. We will train them to become highly specialised and qualified.
We also want our certification services to be much faster, and to that end, we plan on adding new machines, such as vertical machines and pressure management technology, to our workshop.

What criteria are important when choosing a future potential partner?
When we look for a partner, we always determine whether it is licensed to certify the service we want to offer. In addition to this, we evaluate the company’s location, its know-how, its facilities and whether it has a training centre. Training is increasingly important, both for us and for the K-companies here in Kuwait. All of our technicians, including welders and valve technicians, must be certified to work. Every six months, we receive audits from the API to review the skills of our employees and ensure that we continue to improve our capabilities.

What are the company’s strategic goals for the future?
In one year, we will be the leading company in Kuwait. The goal is to obtain new certification and register for new services required by the K-companies through our certifications, primarily rigs, tubing and casing services. For example, contractors increasingly need to fabricate special piping in their oil field operations, and we are well-positioned to offer this service through our engineers and mechanical drawings. We are therefore studying the market to identify the services most in demand in the various sectors and extending our registration to those we have the capacity and experience to offer.
Looking ahead, the company will add at least three or four new certifications in the next few years and participate in major tenders in the oil and gas sector. It also has the potential to become an educational institution that promotes knowledge and skills throughout Kuwait for the benefit of the entire economy.

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