Perpose Onaghise: The global footprint of a drilling and measurement engineer beyond Africa
Early roles: The call of the rig
Perpose Onaghise with over 20 years in drilling and measurement engineering joined the oil and gas industry in 2005, driven by a fascination with the complex interplay of rigs, turbines, and precise measurements that unlock the field’s most critical data. His first role was as a Maintenance Technician with a global oil and gas company, based in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The objective was simple in theory: keep the equipment running, minimise downtime, and learn the language of maintenance, reliability, and measurement.
Early responsibilities
As a Maintenance Technician, he performed routine preventive maintenance on rotating equipment, hydraulic systems, and drilling support equipment. Documented work orders, tracked failure patterns, and supported calibration activities for measurement tools.
Perpose gained proficiency in mechanical disassembly, inspection, and reassembly, learning to identify wear, misalignment, and lubrication issues that affected drill string performance and downhole measurements and further embraced rigorous HSE practices, conducted toolbox talks, and participated in incident investigations to ensure root-cause analysis informed future interventions.
First break: A move into drilling and measurement
As he demonstrated reliability and a detail-oriented mindset, opportunities opened to join the Drilling and Measurement team. The role combined field drilling operations with measurement-while-drilling (MWD) and wireline instrumentation. This transition allowed Perpose to develop the core competence that would define his career: translating instrumentation data into actionable decisions that maximized drilling efficiency and minimized risk.
Geographies of growth
Early exposure to mature wells and frontline maintenance, pushing the limits of equipment uptime and measurement integrity were his experience in Nigeria; in Ghana gained experience with coastal operations, sand management challenges, and wellbore stability considerations that influenced measurement strategies.
Extended reach and deep-water readiness drills, refining calibration routines for downhole sensors under demanding conditions formed his experience in Cameroon.
Senior roles and reliability leadership
In Nigeria, Perpose advanced to Senior Maintenance Technician, responsible for supervising crews, planning maintenance windows, and ensuring critical equipment—pumps, mud motors, rotary tables, draw-works—maintained peak reliability. Key outcomes included:
Reduced unscheduled downtime through proactive vibration analysis, lubrication optimization, and equipment condition monitoring. His leadership implemented standardized maintenance checklists that improved consistency across shifts and sites.
Mentored junior technicians, fostering a culture of meticulous fault diagnosis and rapid issue escalation and ultimately elevating equipment uptime.
Reliability and quality maintenance champion: Driving data-driven excellence
With a focus on reliability, he led a cross-functional Reliability Improvement initiative that spanned Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea. The mission was to connect maintenance rigor with measurement fidelity to improve drilling performance and well integrity.
His leadership also developed KPI dashboards tracking MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), MTTR (Mean Time to Repair), calibration drift, and measurement accuracy.
Instituted a Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) process for critical drilling and measurement assets, prioritizing actions that delivered the greatest reliability gains, not forgetting the implementation of a Quality Maintenance program that aligned with ISO standards and client specifications, ensuring that maintenance activities did not just restore function but preserved measurement integrity.
International exposure
Perpose led reliability studies on off-site standby equipment and surface readout systems, reducing inadvertent test departures due to measurement errors, coordinated with drilling performance teams to correlate equipment health with drilling performance metrics, informing wobbling-cassette calibration and downhole tool readiness; facilitated and implemented remote diagnostic practices, leveraging telemetry from rigs to regional hubs for rapid fault isolation and maintenance planning across Ghana, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and the United States.
Mechanical tech lead and cross-functional excellence
As a Mechanical Tech
Lead, Perpose transitioned into a more strategic role—robust designing maintenance plans, leading technical reviews, and mentoring regional teams across multiple countries.
Technical Leadership was brought to the fore when he guided mechanical integrity programmes for surface equipment, vibration analysis programs, and lubrication optimization, ensuring alignment with operational targets. Demonstrating top notch capabilities in project execution. He also led equipment modification and retrofitting efforts to raise reliability of rotary steerable equipment, and measurement-while-drilling sensors.
Mindful of standards and best practices, he developed a library of standard operating procedures (SOPs) for critical mechanical tasks, calibrations, and condition monitoring activities.
Global company context: Leveraging scale for local impact
Working in a global oil and gas company provided exposure to standardized best practices, lifecycle management, and a global supply chain. The key success factors included:
Adopting a structured maintenance planning system that integrated with drilling schedules to minimize non-productive time (NPT).
Coordinating with procurement and engineering teams to source high-quality components, reducing the risk of counterfeit or substandard parts in multiple jurisdictions.
Ensuring compliance with local regulations and international specifications, balancing global standards with on-the-ground realities in Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea.
Measurement integrity as a core competency
A central pillar of success for Perpose was ensuring measurement integrity in all operations:
Calibrated sensors, downhole tools, and surface readouts with traceable standards.
Implemented routine calibration verification and drift analysis to maintain data accuracy critical for well placement and formation evaluation and built a culture of measurement quality that stakeholders could trust for decision-making in drilling campaigns.
Outcomes, leadership philosophy, and looking forward
He achieved significant reductions in downtime across multiple rigs due to predictive maintenance and robust calibration regimes.
Improvement in drilling performance metrics attributed to higher reliability of surface and downhole measurement systems.
Enhanced safety and compliance through standardized maintenance practices and better data governance and stronger capability in remote diagnostics, enabling faster response times and reduced field visits without compromising equipment health.
Leadership philosophy: People, process, and performance
Perpose invests in the growth of newly recruited technicians and engineers through mentorship, structured training, and clear career pathways through standardized maintenance workflows, measurement calibration routines, and data collection practices to deliver consistent results thereby wrapping compensation and recognition to reliability metrics, quality maintenance outcomes, and overall drilling efficiency.
Regional collaboration and knowledge sharing
Perpose established cross-border communities of practice for Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and the United States where he shared incident learnings, calibration techniques, and best practices for measurement instrumentation to raise the bar regionally and globally. His coordination with global headquarters to ensure regional feedback informs global standards and equipment upgrades.
Looking forward
As the industry evolves with digital twins, advanced analytics, and autonomous drilling systems, his aim is to: deepen data-driven maintenance capabilities with more sophisticated predictive models for measurement and surface equipment, expand remote diagnostics to empower field teams with real-time support and faster decision-making and to continue mentoring the next generation of drilling and measurement engineers to sustain high reliability, quality maintenance, and safe operations across geographies.
