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Frédéric
MAUBEUGE
French citizen
Total E&P Syria. Geosciences Manager,
Damascus, Syria.
Earned an Engineering Degree from Ecole
des Mines in Nancy, France, and a PhD from
University of South Carolina-Columbia, in
the USA.
Has built a career in Geosciences, working
with subsidiaries.
When I qualified as an engineer, I volunteered
to do my National Service with Elf in the
USA. The project involved analysing abnormal
pressure phenomena that occurred during
drilling operations on some reservoirs,
and Elf had taken an interest in some of
the research work underway at the University
of South Carolina. Elf offered me a job
when I finished my National Service with
them, but I wanted to finish my PhD first.
I did, and Elf got back in touch a few months
later. I took the job that time, even if
it wasn’t directly related to what
I had studied in the USA. That was how I
joined Central Services and started working
on production logs, perusing and interpreting
readings from tube wells. I spent three
years exploring that line of work before
being assigned to an operational job in
a subsidiary.
From Africa to
the Middle East.
First it was Pointe Noire, Congo Brazzaville,
in 1996, to work on developing and operating
the N’Kossa field as a Reservoir Engineer.
Then came some unstable times. My family
was repatriated twice. In the end, I spent
three years in Pointe Noire and two based
in Pau travelling back and forth to Pointe
Noire. In the meantime, I had also been
entrusted with developing a new field, and
been appointed Reservoir Liaison Officer
and put in charge of monitoring developments
in fields that were operated by consortia
in which Total was a stakeholder, not the
main operator.
The opportunity to work in Syria as a Reservoir
Engineer came up in 2001. It wasn’t
a promotion as such, but it paved the road
for one: I was promoted to Reservoir Manager
at that subsidiary a year later. Last summer,
the subsidiary’s Geosciences team
doubled in size following a merger, and
I was put in charge of the Geosciences Department,
which encompasses Reservoirs, Geology and
Geophysics.
Work in a subsidiary.
There was some concern when war broke out
in Iraq, but living and working here is
very safe. We operate 8 fields and about
35 wells, producing some 85,000 barrels
of oil equivalent a day. It’s a fairly
small subsidiary, but the production contracts
are quite attractive and our production
sells well.
My job here is coming to an end; I’ll
probably be leaving this summer. I’d
like to do the same thing but in a larger
subsidiary.
Medium-term, my career-development and career-diversifying
prospects will involve using my experience
outside Geosciences.
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