10th oil baron rides into town

The Life: Abu Dhabi-based Jim Watson, the founder and general manager of Certified Oilfield Rentals and a new oil baron, recalls his journey and where he wants to go.

Jim Watson, a native of Aberdeen, has come a long way since he started out as a fisherman when he was 16 years old. Sammy Dallal / The National

A framed picture of the explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig hangs behind Jim Watson's chair at his office in the industrial complex of Mussaffah.

It serves as a reminder, says the founder and general manager of Certified Oilfield Rentalsin Abu Dhabi that supplies drilling equipment to oil companies.

"It's a reminder that things can go wrong and do go wrong," says Mr Watson, 54, of the 2010 explosion.

Mr Watson has been in the industry since he was recruited by Britain's Wood Group to lay cables from rig to rig in the cold and rough North Sea.

This year he was crowned the 10th "oil baron", an award he was nominated for by the readers of the industry magazine Pipeline.

It comes as the UAE and Middle East continue to reap the benefits of high oil prices and unabated investment in the industry.

But for the Aberdeen native, the journey to award status started 38 years ago when he was a 16-year-old fisherman.

When oil companies flocked to Aberdeen in the 1970s, they were looking for fishermen "because we would spend so much time at sea", Mr Watson says. "Even though we had no experience in oilfields."

Back then he recalls spending 30 days at sea and three days at home earning £2.10 (Dh11.90 at current conversion rates) a day.

On his 18th birthday, he joined Wood and has travelled ever since, becoming an inspector specialising in drilling tools at 23.

Then came Libya. By the 1980s, the country's oil sector was reeling from falling global oil prices and sanctions imposed by the United States, a situation that led to partial play of the private sector.

It seemed an unlikely place to end up with Mr Watson spending a few years in Libya with DG Oilfield Services.

The adventures of oil sector personnel in the deserts often sound fantastic, but Mr Watson claims his are "true stories".

In his two years there, with his family back in Aberdeen, he says he roamed all over Chad and Tunisia and got into some sticky situations.

"I have had handguns up my nose and [been] in jail many times," he says. "But it was all fine."

After a brief stint in his home town, Mr Watson came to Sharjah in 1996 as part of International Tubular Services.

"I came to buy a company for sale," he said. "And saw it was more viable to start one from scratch."

The sector was a lucrative one as the companies were desperately looking for more technology.

But with the parent company not willing to move in the direction he had in mind, he exited the company in 2000 and formed Certified Oilfield Rentals in Abu Dhabi.

"They have to maintain old [rigs] or drill new ones, so business is always there," Mr Watson says. "The problem is over the years, so many other companies have opened up and there is harder competition."

When he started COR in 2000, there was one rival company. Now, he has to compete with more than 10.

COR had an annual turnover between US$20 million and $30m last year - an indicator that supports Mr Watson's confidence in the sector.

Increased competition, however, means he does not have to fear running out of equipment, unlike the massive rush he saw in 2004 and 2005.

But as a rentals company, deciding what equipment to buy, trying to ascertain what is next and whether it would be used are the tough decisions.

Among his 130 customers are Halliburton, BP, Total, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) and Dubai Petroleum.

Apart from Iraq, where he says he will not go because everyone else is doing so, he is putting his faith in Thailand, Qatar and "anything that ends in "stan," he says.

"Other companies are multinationals or subsidiaries of multinationals, I am a local company and I talk to [my clients] as friends and partners," he says.

And that is one of the reasons he bagged the trophy for Oil Baron. From the Mussaffah yard stacked with pipes and equipment from the machine shop, Mr Watson headed to Dubai on a Harley Davidson dressed in black tie to collect his award from the "glitter ball".