Oil and Gas
Tier 1 Oil and Gas Operator, West Africa
Geography
West Africa
Engagement
10+ years, contract renewed with expanded scope
Status
Active, original Mi-C3 platform extended into Affectli with new capabilities under renewed contract
$600M+ annual exposure. Materially reduced.
Indicative gross loss from bunkering before deployment, at market price. Recovery rate not publicly disclosed.
Annual gross losses to bunkering before deployment ran at $600M to $1B at market price, derived from a baseline of 1,000,000+ barrels per month. Recovery rate not publicly disclosed. The operator extended the contract past year ten and added CCTV, fuel management, digital twins, and document storage at renewal: the strongest available proof that the recovery was material.
The challenge
What the operator was trying to fix.
- Annual gross losses to bunkering running into the hundreds of millions of dollars. 1,000,000+ barrels per month vanishing from the operating territory, equivalent to $600M to $1B per year at market price (indicative, based on prevailing crude pricing).
- Limited visibility of remote assets across a challenging West African operating territory, with theft and asset recovery problems compounded by distance.
- Limited communication with the production plant base; commercial-grade terrestrial networks unreliable across the operating area.
- Manual NOC and Occurrence Book process for capturing situational reports, with no audit trail and no path to root cause analysis.
Results
What the platform delivered.
$600M to $1B
Indicative annual gross bunkering losses before deployment, derived from 1M+ barrels per month at market price
Not disclosed
Actual recovery rate of bunkering losses post-deployment (recovery proxy: contract renewal at expanded scope)
10 years
Continuous platform operation before contract renewal
Renewed
Contract extended at expanded scope: CCTV, full fuel management, digital twins, document storage
2
Leading satellite networks integrated for voice and SMS coverage where terrestrial networks fail
Capabilities deployed
- Digitised NOC and Occurrence Book processes
- Integrated satellite communications and SMS
- Alarm and event monitoring
- NOC incident management
- Geofencing and exclusion zones
- Real-time asset tracking with GPS positioning
- Route planning, ETA calculations, and distance measurement
- Fuel usage monitoring
- Audit history for root cause analysis and SOPs
- Asset playback for RCA reporting
- Panic button integration
Narrative
The brief at engagement was defined by a loss, not by a technology gap. The operator was losing 1,000,000+ barrels of oil per month to bunkering across a challenging West African operating territory. At market price for crude, that loss runs $600M to $1B per year (indicative, based on prevailing crude pricing). Over a ten-year window, even a modest recovery percentage compounds into hundreds of millions of dollars retained on the operator’s balance sheet. The actual recovery percentage is not publicly disclosed.
The first deployment phase digitised the basics. The NOC process and Occurrence Book moved off paper into a structured incident management system with full audit trail. Two leading satellite communications networks were integrated to provide voice and SMS coverage where terrestrial networks could not reach. IoT assets, GPS positioning, and panic buttons were instrumented across the operation, all surfacing through a single Affectli pane.
Subsequent phases layered operational depth incrementally over the ten-year window. Alarm and event monitoring. Geofencing and exclusion zones for asset and personnel security. Real-time asset tracking, route planning, ETA calculations, and fuel usage monitoring. The platform now retains full audit history for root cause analysis and supports asset-playback for retrospective incident reporting.
The proof that the recovery was material is the contract itself. After ten years, the operator did not reset with a new vendor or pull the platform in-house. The contract was renewed at expanded scope: CCTV monitoring and live streaming, a full fuel management solution, digital twins for selected assets, and document storage. A Tier 1 operator extending and adding scope to a ten-year platform after a decade of measurable operation is the strongest available signal that the saving justified the spend.
Contract renewal, expanded scope
- CCTV monitoring and live streaming
- Full fuel management solution
- Digital twins
- Document storage