Oil & Gas

Considered to be the biggest sector in the world in terms of dollar value, the oil and gas industry is a global powerhouse employing hundreds of thousands of workers worldwide as well as generating hundreds of billions of dollars globally each year. In regions which house the major NOCs, these oil and gas companies are so vital they often contribute a significant amount towards national GDP.

The oil and gas industry can be broken down into three key areas: Upstream, midstream and downstream.

• Upstream: The upstream component is also referred to as the E&P (exploration and exploration). This involves the search for underwater and underground natural gas fields or crude oil fields and the drilling of exploration wells and drilling into established wells to recover oil and gas.
• Midstream: Midstream entails the transportation, storage and processing of oil and gas. Once resources are recovered, it has to be transported to a refinery, which is often in a completely different geographic region compared to the oil and gas reserves. Transportation can include anything from tanker ships to pipelines and trucking fleets.
• Downstream: Downstream refers to the filtering of the raw materials obtained during the upstream phase. This means refining crude oil and purifying natural gas. The marketing and commercial distribution of these products to consumers and end users in a number of forms including natural gas, diesel oil, petrol, gasoline, lubricants, kerosene, jet fuel, asphalt, heating oil, LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) as well as a number of other types of petrochemicals.