After spending more than 30 years abroad, it was time for him to return
home to Guyana. Mangal had followed the footsteps of his parents by taking
his education in Edinburgh, Scotland and then joining the largest oilfield service company
in the world, Schlumberger, in a career that spanned 20 years internationally. Of particular
note was that he was headhunted to join a pioneering Danish oilfield service company,
Welltec, in the field of subsea and downhole robotics to lead their international growth
efforts.
Mangal’s story is about an adventurous spirit that allowed no barriers, mental, physical or racial to stand in the way of
working his way up to be recognised as a well-respected ‘oil man’ internationally. This means having earned respect and building a substantial global network from many players in the oil business, including major oil companies such as Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Agip and service companies such as Schlumberger, Halliburton, BakerHughes/GE and Welltec.
Returning to Subryanville, Georgetown in late 2016 was a long-awaited homecoming for Lars Mangal.
FORMATIVE YEARS
Mangal’s parents met whilst pursuing their respective studies in Medicine. His father, Dr. Keshav ‘Buddy’ Mangal was studying Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and his mother, Jonna Mangal, from Denmark, was studying to be a nurse. Mangal grew up in the idyllic suburb of Subryanville, Georgetown, surrounded by fruit trees with fresh breeze wafting from the Atlantic Ocean nearby. There were friends to play with from the neighbourhood including the Hughes, the Trotmans, the Fernandes and the Sawhs, to name a few. Mangal attend primary and secondary school in Georgetown
before going to Edinburgh to study Engineering around 1980. He successfully completed his Engineering Honours Degree in 1990 and joined Schlumberger the same year. Whilst at university in Edinburgh, during his final year, Mangal
won the prestigious John Rayner Shield for his project on combined heat and power systems. During his summer vacations, he would work on diving support and survey vessels in the ferocious North Sea, becoming a qualified and certified North Sea Tiger. And it was during this time that he became aware of the oil and gas industry, being in close proximity to Aberdeen, which was one of the early international hubs for the oil and gas industry.
Mangal applied to Schlumberger, at that time the world’s second largest oilfield services company, in a very determined
and focused way, successfully securing a job offer which he immediately accepted to pursue an international career as a Field Engineer in the Dowell Schlumberger division. He worked across several of Schlumberger’s business entities, getting both multiproduct line and geographical exposure.
Prior to leaving Schlumberger, Mangal led the global Hydraulic Fracturing division of the company, based from Houston, as Vice President of Stimulation Services. Stimulation Services include hydraulic well fracturing – the process that fractures reservoir rocks deep underground. Fracturing has enabled the United States to increase its hydrocarbon production to the extent that it is about to be the largest oil and gas producer in the world. Mangal was involved as one of the early pioneers supporting the growth of this now enormous business. The ‘oil man’ then joined Welltec, a pioneering robotic company in the oil and gas industry, based near Copenhagen, Denmark, as the Chief Commercial Officer. During his time at Welltec, Mangal also led the fastest growing and most successful
region as Senior Vice President in UK, Continental Europe, Russia and Former Soviet Union (CIS). He successfully lead the commercial team and Welltec through a period of record breaking growth over 4 years, doubling the business prior to departing in early 2015, around the same time that ExxonMobil announced its enormous oil discovery in Guyana.
The non-obvious, not to say risky, move from the ‘comfort’ of a company that dominates the segment it operated into a small ‘unknown’ emerging company neatly sums up Mangal’s character – restless, opportunity seeking and aggressive, but with the ability to build teams to scale up the successes he is constantly seeking.
Then, a defining moment came to take the biggest step of all – to leave completely the security of working as a high-level executive in a fast growing international company to starting his own. The catalyst for this decision was, as well, a defining moment
of his home country – Guyana. In May 2015, ExxonMobil and its partners discovered oil in the Liza 1 Exploration well in the Stabroek block, 180 kilometres from the coast of Guyana and at water depths of around 2 kilometres deep. There was no guarantee that this discovery was going to be developed, but this very experienced ‘oil man’ made his analysis of the potential outcomes of this discovery and decided that now was the time to work out a business plan and to start forming the best team that he could to return home.
COMING HOME
The Oil and Gas Industry is inherently a risky, adventurous business – safety or technical risk is an ever present focus.
Commercial risks are also ever present; there are no guarantees that oil and gas will be found after investing multi-millions of dollars in exploration. There are no guarantees that even after oil and gas is discovered that the quantities are sufficient for commercial exploitation. The fact that the Liza discovery was made in 2,000 metres under the ocean meant that only a handful of oil companies, also known as Operators, had the competence and the deep pockets to exploit the discovery.
These risks were well known to Mangal and his team, but did not deter them. The arduous work to define what the opportunities were, calculate the amount of investment needed and using all available savings as seed money to start the company were the outcomes of a series of risk evaluations that were performed in the short space of a few months.
The next task at hand was to attract enough knowledgeable investors to invest enough funds to ensure that any ventures entered into will not collapse due to insufficient funding. Dreams are ever present; the challenge is to actualise those dreams into projects with an able team to execute them. The initial focus in Europe with operations in Africa and
the Mediterranean all expressed interest in participating in Guyana and spent many long weeks of due diligence with Mangal, only to pull out after this costly process. There was only one thing to do, get the team together and head back home.
October 2016 was the month of homecoming. Mangal and his small team set up shop in the ex-family home in Subryanville. Waiting for them were trusted friends of the family that were renowned in Guyana in the past as the most experienced mining logistics operators, key amongst them was Fred and Deb Sparrock.
The team quickly set to work to refurbish the former family home into a location that now serves as the office headquarters and staff house. This was a pioneering time for all, as the contrast from the comforts and certainty
of being high-level employees of international companies had been exchanged for the realities of working in a start-up company.
The first order of the day was setting up the newly formed TOTALTEC Oilfield Services Guyana Inc. Next was the setting
of the mission statement. Mangal had the clear ambition that if he, a Guyanese, could succeed intern to succeed in this field. The ambition to create a world class International Petroleum and Maritime Academy was born. Next was to ponder on how a Guyanese from the diaspora and his team can work with capable and competent Guyanese companies in partnership to jointly address opportunities in the emerging oil and gas industry. This was surprisingly, or not
surprisingly, easier said than done. Diligent efforts were needed to engage local players to frame the joint opportunities available in the near future for both parties. There were nearly equal measures of effort required to inform the opportunities, i.e. a crash course in the oil and gas industry, to translate how business opportunities
were available to the two parties and the translation of oil and gas knowledge into crafting compelling narratives whereby a Guyanese entity can be seriously considered as a supplier to ExxonMobil or other operators as well as to the multitude of international oilfield service companies that are about to enter the Guyanese market.
Another important area of effort was to convince all parties for the need of Guyanese companies to collaborate in order to bring a balanced mix of local knowledge, oil and gas knowledge, marketing and facilities.
The oil and gas industry is a high technology endeavour with stringent requirements in terms of safety culture and
behaviour, record keeping, reliable service delivery, product quality, etc. and all of these items are stringently audited before even an invitation to bid is issued. This led Mangal and his team to actively search out for international partners who could not only fill the technology and process gaps that his company and local partners had, but also exhibited a strong commitment to voluntarily ensure that they were interested in Guyana for the long haul by supporting local
content. This pragmatic thinking and strategy yielded quick results when Mangal syndicated the joint venture – Guyana Shore Base Inc.
– that submitted a competitive bid and were awarded the ExxonMobil tender for Shore Base and Logistics support services for the build out of the Liza Phase 1 development. ExxonMobil was taking a big bet to award this newly formed, majority Guyanese owned joint venture to provide the ‘home’ for them and critical suppliers to load out time critical
supplies for the drilling of the development wells as well as some components of the subsea production system in readiness for ‘First Oil’ in 2020.
Other agreements were signed when international companies were pleasantly surprised to discover that a Guyanese Oilfield Service Company was operating in Guyana with staff that had extensive, decades-long experience in the international oil and gas industry. These agreements led to ensuring that the international companies had a smooth
in-boarding to Guyana, and to accelerating their understanding of how and where local content could be sourced, thus reducing their overall costs by avoiding imports to meet their needs.
Mangal believes that these are the very early days of the oil adventure in Guyana and he hopes that local businesses can
take comfort that they can participate in the industry if they take a pragmatic approach; keep an open mind to partnerships, both local and international; and above all, have trusted advisors from the oil and gas industry to assist
them in spotting the gaps that need to be filled before they can be considered as suppliers to the oil and gas industry.
Mangal, in his quieter moments, marvels at his initial strategy of participating in developing a shore base which has come to fruition. There is a long road ahead; building trust and team work between four partners in a joint venture was never going to be an easy task, but the key is in the steady results they are producing week by week.
Mangal is concurrently working on a project that is closest to his heart – one that demonstrates that when Guyanese are
working with and providing opportunities to Guyanese, the results should be a strong contribution to capacity building in Guyana.
He believes that now is the right time for launching a project that he and his team have been working on for the past year –the International Petroleum and Maritime Academy (IPMA).
IPMA is to be launched as an in-house vocational academy, a finishing school for TOTALTEC Oilfield Services Guyana Inc. recruits. The driver for this venture is to avoid altogether the ‘chicken and egg’ scenario whereby Guyanese workers are missing out on opportunities for jobs in the oil and gas industry due to a lack of qualifications or
relevant job experience.
The IPMA will break this vicious circle by hiring the successful Guyanese candidates of the 10 week intensive vocational training course after their graduation. This addresses their initial lack of qualification, as they will be qualified at the end of the course, and the best graduates will be placed in oil and gas industry jobs immediately or almost immediately after graduation. Mangal believes that successful Guyanese companies, as well as international companies who truly believe in building a competitive edge in the Guyanese oil and gas industry, will be strongly supporting this industry led initiative to build local capacity. He insists that the most pragmatic approach to accelerating the relevance of his newly minted company is to partner both locally and internationally and concurrently work to build local capacity. By all accounts,
this is not doing business, but following a vocation. Guyana looks forward to following the progress of this pioneering oil and gas service company with big ambitions to serve the industry locally and to accelerate the introduction of a Guyanese workforce in the industry.
