On August 20, 2026, the American oil and gas multinational VAALCO Gabon S.A. announced the appointment of Hermélia Hayes Mbadinga as Managing Director and Country Manager, with immediate effect. It is a major milestone for this Gabonese executive, whose more than twenty-five-year career has followed the major transformations of the country’s energy and industrial sectors.
The appointment marks the culmination of a career built through hands-on operational experience and increasing management responsibilities.
At the helm of VAALCO Gabon, Hermélia Hayes Mbadinga will now have a strategic mandate: to lead the company’s operations and turn its ambitions into tangible results. Her priorities include the ongoing drilling program; the continued development of the Etame Marin asset, an important offshore oil field located off the coast of Gabon that represents the historical core and central asset of the American company; infrastructure optimization; reserve growth; and the identification of new exploration and development opportunities.
But beyond the appointment itself lies the story of a professional who knows the oil industry from the inside.
From oil facilities to corporate strategy
Hermélia Hayes Mbadinga began her professional career at Shell, where she spent seventeen years, working in Gabon and later in Brunei Darussalam. It was a demanding environment that enabled her to develop expertise spanning both technical and managerial disciplines.
Early in her career, she worked with static equipment before moving into well and production-related activities. At Rabi, the country’s largest onshore oil field, she first worked as a Mechanical Support Engineer before becoming a Wellsite Petroleum Engineer and Assistant Drilling Supervisor. She then moved into the core area of her expertise: production technology.
At the Gamba Ivinga and Rabi oil fields, she was involved in well surveillance, optimization and integrity management. At Rabi, she notably contributed to the daily optimization of production reaching as much as 30,000 barrels per day. Her responsibilities included well recompletions, well interventions, integrity issues and operations aimed at recovering remaining hydrocarbons.
This field experience became a defining thread throughout her career: understanding the mechanics and operational realities of an oil asset before progressively taking on broader strategic responsibilities.
Brunei: An International Experience
In 2010, her career took on an international dimension when she joined Brunei Shell Petroleum, the Sultanate of Brunei’s largest oil and gas company.
In the coastal town of Seria, the historic heart of the country’s energy industry, she became a Production Technologist and later Greater Seria Cluster Lead. She was then responsible for a broad portfolio of wells, with duties covering well integrity, optimization and development.
The experience was substantial. She was responsible for managing the integrity of hundreds of wells, coordinating well intervention and drilling operations, identifying production opportunities and leading teams.
This immersion in a multicultural environment further strengthened her profile. Beyond mastering technical challenges, she learned to manage assets, teams and complex trade-offs in an international setting.
Back in Gabon, she became Senior Corporate Planner/Economist and later Asset Planning and Integration Manager at Shell. Her career thus evolved progressively from individual wells to broader asset portfolios, and from production operations to corporate strategy.
The Shift Toward Human Resources and Governance
In 2017, Hermélia Hayes Mbadinga embarked on a new chapter, joining Assala Energy as Director of Human Resources and Stakeholder Relations.
At first glance, this move may appear far removed from her early engineering roles. Yet it became another key component of her professional profile.
She was notably involved in the transition from Shell to Assala and in managing relationships with the company’s various stakeholders. She gained exposure to another critical dimension of corporate performance: people, organizational transformation, social dialogue and engagement with communities and partners.
In 2020, she joined Gabon Plantations, the Olam Palm & Rubber Gabon operations, as Director of Human Resources and Vice President of Human Resources and Legal Affairs.
For more than four years, she worked in one of the country’s major industrial sectors, at the intersection of social, legal and economic challenges. In 2025, she was promoted to Senior Vice President of Human Resources.
A Return to the Oil Industry
Her career had by then produced an uncommon combination: technical training and experience in the oil industry, complemented by extensive expertise in human resources, corporate law, governance and stakeholder relations.
This broad skill set paved the way for her return to the oil industry.
In November 2025, Hermélia Hayes Mbadinga joined VAALCO Gabon as Deputy Managing Director. Just a few months later, she took the helm of the Gabonese subsidiary.
In many ways, the circle has come full circle. The professional who began her career among industrial equipment, wells and oilfield operations is now leading a major player in the sector, armed with a much broader understanding of business.
She understands operational constraints, production requirements and asset integrity challenges. But she also understands the human dynamics of an organization, stakeholder relations and the demands of corporate governance.
A solid academic foundation
Hermélia Hayes holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering, obtained in 2000 from Loughborough University in the United Kingdom. Eleven years later, in 2011, she deepened her specialization by earning a master’s degree in Petroleum Engineering from Curtin University in Australia.
That combination of mechanical engineering and petroleum engineering laid the technical foundations for a career that would take her from oilfield operations to corporate leadership.
Today, at the head of VAALCO Gabon, Hermélia Hayes Mbadinga embodies a rare combination of field expertise, international experience and executive leadership, a trajectory that has taken her from the machinery and wells of Gabon’s oil fields to the strategic decisions shaping the future of one of the country’s key energy assets.
