A Director of Africa Oil Services (AOS), Mr David Somorin, has advised potential service providers and authorities in the oil and gas industry to impress on production companies to provide their guidelines and standards for all to be abreast with. his he said will ensure that standards would be known ahead and local service providers who meet them could demand contracts for the services they qualified for. Mr Somorin said this in Accra last Tuesday at the launch of a series of work¬shops on "Local Content Development and Value Chain Building in Ghana's Oil and Gas Industry," jointly organised by the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) and AOS Orwell to be held for interested companies. According to him, bodies such as the AGI and government agencies responsible for the industry should ask the oil production companies to write down in clear language what they looked out for as quality standards, adding that "this will make the local companies confident to ask of jobs and contracts which they know they qualify to execute." Mr Somorin, who is also in charge of New Business and Corporate Development, expressed the hope that such training be offered Ghanaian companies, and that would go a long way to help Ghana to avoid the mistakes that Nigeria made in extracting its oil and gas. The Vice President of the AGI, Mr Samuel Appenteng, said the active involvement of Ghanaians in oil and gas exploration, development, production and utilisation through local content was very dear to the AGI, which he said had taken particular interest in supporting local companies to benefit from the oil find. "We believe the best way for them to benefit is to do business with the international companies operating in Ghana,” Mr Appenteng said, “but conceded that the local companies lacked capacity; the reason the association had teamed up with AOS to organise series of certificate-awarding training programmes for the potential service companies. He disclosed that having done a lot of policy advocacy, capacity building and business matchmaking, AGI was ready to open an Oil and Gas Centre in Takoradi to further strengthen capacity development activities. "To this end, the joint forces of Africa Oil Services and the AGI in this capacity development initiative will provide small and medium scale enterprises with the requisite training to enhance their competitiveness in oil and gas," the AGI vice president said. The Executive Director, Mr Seth Twum Akwaboa, explained that the centre would collate all information regarding oil and gas services available in the industry, set out the skills and standards to help the members secure funding for the job. AOL is a Nigerian company with specialisation in upstream oil services which started operations in 1981. Orwell has its origin in Aberdeen, Scotland, which started operations in Nigeria in 2000. The two companies merged in 2009 and besides training also offer variety of services, including drilling, surveys, evaluation services, inspection and certification as well as running of a machine shop for fabrications.