Fatima Mahmoud, who is a reservoir engineer at Maersk Oil Qatar was awarded Outstanding Female Achiever at Oil & Gas Middle East Awards in Abu Dhabi last night.
She was praised by the judges for her breath of work and for having evolved into a senior manager in a short space of time.
She was also earmarked as having “real potential to develop as a leader.”
Mahmoud commented: “I feel so happy. I’m so proud. The nomination itself was a surprise for me. The nomination came from my manager and I want to thank him for all his support and faith in my potential. I hope I can deliver as much as I can to my company and my state.”
Maersk’s champion was presented with the award on stage by Narish Nathan, CEO of Eversendai Offshore- Gold Sponsors for this year’s awards.
The judges said they were “encouraged to see more evidence of female talent emerging in the region’s oil and gas industry, and praised the standard of all the nominations in this category.”
They also congratulated all three nominees who have made the shortlist.
Mahmoud has spent five years with Maersk and says being a female in in the industry is a bit of a challenge.
“I have two young kids and for me there is this ongoing challenge of meeting the expectation of doing well at my job and raise my kids. The reason why I could so far manage to do both is because I really enjoy what I do, which gives me satisfaction and helps me achieve more and deliver more. I feel more fulfilled really.”
She also added that in her opinion companies are doing the best they can to attract more women to oil and gas jobs. “Every time you see an advert for an oil and gas job, there is a woman on the picture.
That’s because we are in the spotlight for the time being and they are actively looking for females.”
Mahmoud says the old days of hiring any local female just to fill in gaps have gone. National oil companies look for qualifications and expertise first, before anything else.
“Gaining good education, we now have to prove to the companies that we have competitive engineer skills and not just in oil and gas, in any profession. It is really great that we have not been looked at as female. We are been treated as any other professional in the workplace. We can go to meetings and we can challenge all the men next to us. We feel equal.”
Mahmoud revealed that Maersk has recently launched an integrated project- a collaborating between geologists, petrophysicist and drilling engineers, for optimising the production of the slowly maturing Al Shaheen Oil Field in Qatar.
Leading the project herself, she said that if everything goes according to plan it will get executed by 2015- 2016. “We have a certain production potential targets assigned by Maersk Oil, which we are looking to meet with this Al Shaheen project. At the moment we are trying to solve all the problems in the reservoir itself.”
