Neeraj Sethi had always harboured ambitions of being a professional tennis player.

Sethi, now the country leader for Baker Hughes' India business, drew inspiration from tennis veterans like John McEnroe and Ivan Lendl in his early days playing for his school and other venues.

“I had a slightly different ambition in life, and I always wanted to play tennis,” he says.

For Sethi, a sports enthusiast, giving up his childhood passion was never easy.

However, he later realised that tennis wasn’t proving to be a viable career option, so he parted ways with his tennis racket and took up engineering, his other strong interest area, for higher studies.

Sethi studied chemical engineering at IIT Mumbai, one of India’s best-ranked engineering colleges, where he developed a strong fondness for technology.

In 1996, he started working for Baker Hughes as a field engineer and began a long and successful climb up the ladder.

Industry veteran

With more than two decades in the oil and gas industry, across geographies and multiple companies, Sethi has earned the title of industry veteran.

In addition to Baker Hughes, he worked with Halliburton, Asian Oilfield Services and Selan Exploration Technology over the course of his career.

He recollects his early days at Baker Hughes, when he operated from remote locations without any infrastructure in place.

“We had no office and even worked out of containers at times,” he says.

His most challenging career phase came in 2002, when he was entrusted with the responsibility of setting up Baker Hughes' India business.

Over the years, Sethi helped grow the company’s business line and oilfield services clientele, which now includes industry giants such as Vedanta, Reliance and Oil & Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC).

Baker Hughes, along with partners McDermott and Larsen & Toubro, is executing a $1.69 billion integrated subsea umbilicals, flowlines, risers and subsea production system contract from ONGC for the DWN-98/2 deep-water project in the Krishna Godavari basin.

The project has been impacted by Covid-19 disruptions but it remains India’s flagship deep-water development on the east coast, crucial to the country’s energy security.

“There have been disruptions but ONGC continues to invest in the project... We are very much engaged with the project,” says Sethi, who has been closely associated with the project's development.

Despite a faster than expected energy transition and demand destruction for fossil fuels due the ongoing pandemic, Sethi believes that oil and gas demand in India will continue to grow, providing ample opportunities for oilfield service players.

“India cannot ignore the need to produce more oil and gas in the country. It’s a very big market and we cannot be focused on one or two sources of energy,” he says.

Sethi believes that India is seeing a major trend of shifting from coal to gas, as it transitions to a cleaner future.

“We are not just looking at growing hydrocarbon demand but also replacing dirtier fuels, like coal, in the country,” he says.

He adds that India’s liquified natural gas consumption is also expected to double over the next decade, which could prove to be a key driver of energy.

Sethi acknowledges the oil and gas industry's highly cyclical nature and its heavy dependence on the dynamics of supply and demand.

He believes that the industry fundamentals are still robust but that one needs to be well positioned.

“In order to survive this industry across cycles, you need to be fairly strategic,” he says.

Sethi says the coronavirus outbreak is probably “one of the most difficult challenges the world and the oil and gas industry has ever faced”.

“We have been challenged by something which is quite unique and something that we haven’t seen before,” he says.

'Lifeblood of the economy'

However, he sees oil and gas as the “lifeblood of the economy” and says the Covid-19 crisis has presented an opportunity for companies to introduce sweeping technological changes and become more efficient.

“Despite being away from each other, we are getting closer to each other," he says.

"The collaborative framework is much more active today than before. We are now closer-knit through digitisation.”

Sethi hails from the national capital of New Delhi, but his family changed base frequently during his school days, as his father was working in the Indian Army.

“I went through 11 different schools during my childhood,” he says.

Having studied and lived across different cities, Sethi believes that adaptability is crucial in life.

Moving taught him that "you have to be very mobile and adaptable to the new environment".

The same lesson applies to the world of work, especially at a time of upheaval like the present.

"So much of our industry is about change — and you don’t get rattled by the change, as you’re quite used to it."

Field Development

'You need to be strategic': Baker Hughes' Sethi takes adaptability to heart