At least 60 geologists, geophysicists and drilling experts left BAPEX over the last ten years creating a shortage of skilled personnel in the state-run petroleum exploration and production company.
Many of them left due to lack of job satisfaction as BAPEX had not been awarded any gas or oil blocks for several years.
Others left to work in International Oil Companies (OICs) for better pay and conditions of work – sometimes receiving as much as five times the money and benefits.
The brain drain resulted in a shortage of key experts in BAPEX, for undertaking fresh exploration, leaving only a handful of them in its service having more than ten years’ experience.
As the lone company for exploration and production, BAPEX is the most important of 11 concerns under Petrobangla, the state owned oil, gas and minerals corporation.
After graduation from the public universities the geologists, geophysicists and other experts prefer to work for BAPEX, said its officials, for three to seven years and leave to work for multinational petroleum companies.
They said that BAPEX needed about another 15 to 20 experts to work properly.
In 2003 BAPEX was awarded two out of 23 gas blocks after a gap of 11 years.
Badrul Imam, professor of the geology department of Dhaka University told New Age, ‘All oil companies depend on experienced geologists, geophysicists, and drilling experts but BAPEX has been losing them for years.’
Anu Mohammad, professor of the economics department of Jahangirnagar University specialising in the energy sector said that this ‘brain drain’ is a huge waste of public money and talent.
He said, ‘Our boys have been enriching the IOCs when successive governments kept on saying that there is no skilled manpower in the state-run companies in the energy sector.’
An expert needs to give only three months notice to leave BAPEX, when it could take the company at least a year to recruit a replacement.
As BAPEX cannot recruit frequently to replace its personnel it has to wait until it can advertise to appoint a whole batch of new experts.
This results in delays in replacing the key personnel.
Both experts said that there were two reasons the students from the geology and petroleum engineering departments of public universalities of the country left BAPEX for IOCs.
First, BAPEX cannot match the IOCs in providing pay and other facilities.
BAPEX pays a geologist Tk20,000 compared to over Tk100,000 and additional benefits an IOC pays for the same job.
Secondly, since the mid-1990s when IOCs were invited into Bangladesh, governments neither allocated prospective drilling blocks to BAPEX and nor provided it with any new equipment or funding.
Anu Mohammad said that Bangladesh was increasingly depending on IOCs for prospection and extraction of natural gas.
‘IOCs now supply more than 50 per cent of gas to the national grid at a cost that is more than 20 times higher than the state run companies supply’, he said.
Badrul Iman said that the government should allocate BAPEX more oil and gas blocks for exploration.
At the same time, he suggested, the government ought to change the policy package to allow BAPEX to pay better salary and perks to its experts.
‘The young geologists and geophysicists, now working for BAPEX in different exploration and production projects are skilled in handling latest technologies. It would be a great loss if BAPEX loses any more of them’, he said.
Some of the BAPEX geologists have even moved to the civil service. A former BAPEX geologist told New Age, he left seeing no future. But he said he felt frustrated with his new job as an officer of the administration cadre.
He said a number of other former BAPEX experts felt exactly as he did.
BAPEX managing director Mortuza Ahmad Faruque told New Age that he accepted that BAPEX’s efficiency was suffering as a result of the loss of these key experts.
He said that the government was trying to take steps to deal with the pay gap between BAPEX and the IOCs.
A committee in BAPEX, he said, had been working over the last year on the issue of raising the experts’ pay and perks.
He would, he said, send to the authorities its recommendations before the current month runs out.
