ANDRE Coajou is the man who got Elf Aquitaine into deep water — driving the French major to blaze a trail that fellow explorers believed was mission impossible.
Overall, he has worked on about 100 discoveries during a 30-year corporate career and more than a decade of mostly going solo.
Back in the 1990s he headed a 20-strong team in Paris as Elf’s vice president for exploration in Africa, having earlier served in Lagos as a geophysicist uncovering marginal prospects in the maturing Niger Delta, and saw the need to expand their horizon beyond the usual raft of offshore prospects.
“Very
