GE has joined a delegation to Silicon Valley led by Ghana’s vice-president, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, aiming to accelerate the digitisation drive in Africa’s energy sector including oil and gas, to boost the economy of the West African nation
The delegation focused on exploring the possibilities of developing strategic insight and partnerships with leading technology companies in the Silicon Valley area such as GE and others like Google and IBM, also present on the trip.
During the visit, Bawumia and his team took a tour of GE Digital’s San Ramon Facility to receive an overview of GE’s products in power, oil and gas and Predix, GE’s cloud-based data management and predictive analytics platform.
Speaking on the digitalisation drive in Africa’s oil and gas and overall energy sector sector, Sulemana Abubakar, chief information officer of GE Africa, who was amongst the visiting delegation, said, “GE is committed to the sustainable development of Africa and our digital business provides solutions that optimise operations to improve asset performance while keeping costs down. This is what Africa needs and Ghana is in the right direction with the government’s digital transformation programme.”
Africa is embracing digital technologies to unlock vast opportunities in its oil and gas exploration drive. According to the industry experts, Africa’s energy sector, especially the oil and gas industry, can benefit enormously from the latest technology such as graphics processing unit (GPU), Big Data, IoT etc, thus obtaining top-level data for the exploration workflow.
In line with Africa’s digitalisation drive to boost production and operations, Ghana is currently reviewing several regulations governing the information communication technology sector to free up the innovative talent and capabilities of already existing and start-up companies. This aims to make it easier to enter and invest in the sector and encourage ICT uptake.
GE aims to help Ghana in achieving its hidden energy potential. The company’s current project in the West African nation is the Atuabo Waste Gas to Power in Sub-Saharan Africa. With its Predix, GE aims help Ghana in creating software to design, build, operate and manage the country’s entire asset lifecycle, thus enabling Ghana’s assets to operate more efficiently.
