Australia is enjoying a boom in oil and gas exploration and development. Frans Roozendaal, managing director of Technip Oceania, tells Gay Sutton how the company is thriving in this increasingly competitive environment, and responding to the challenges it presents.
Off the coasts of Australia and New Zealand, the race is on to locate and quantify the rich hydrocarbon resources that lie beneath the seabed, and to develop them into commercial operations. There are the enormous coal seam methane reserves off the eastern coast of Australia, while off the western coast lies the North West Shelf region, a geological feature which has already spawned a number of prolific natural gas (NG) wells and associated facilities. The opportunities for further development here are enormous.
Among the many west coast exploration initiatives are the Browse, Pluto, Ichthys and Wheatstone projects. “All of these are on the drawing board at the moment,” explains Frans Roozendaal, managing director of subsea, offshore and onshore engineering company Technip Oceania.
Technip Oceania is part of the Technip Group’s Asia Pacific region, which has its headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and reports to the Group Corporate Head Office in Paris. Technip is a world leader in the fields of project management, engineering and construction for the oil and gas industry. With its main office in Perth, an office in Brisbane and a new office recently opened in New Zealand, Technip Oceania has been operating in Australia since 2002 when the Group acquired subsea engineering specialist Coflexip, which had been operating in the region since 1995. It has, in addition, diversified into offshore and onshore engineering, drawing on expertise and support from the Group’s Asia Pacific headquarters in Kuala Lumpur as well as worldwide.
For subsea installation work, the company owns and operates its own vessels. However, the majority of offshore and onshore construction work is contracted out, leaving Technip to concentrate on its areas of expertise: engineering design, project management, procurement and conceptual work.
“Our main assets, therefore, are our people,” Roozendaal says. “And we invest heavily in them. Australia is rapidly becoming one of the global epicentres for the oil and gas industry—many of our clients are planning massive investments off the east and west coasts, and in New Zealand. And if only a quarter of those go ahead, it will certainly be an enormous investment, but it will also create a massive issue in terms of sourcing engineering and construction resources locally.”
If you add into the equation the expansion also underway in the mining industry, there is the potential for a seriously damaging skills shortage on the horizon. Skilled engineers and skilled labourers are already in short supply, driving costs up.
One way that Technip Oceania has been tackling the issue is by using modular design techniques, whereby facilities are designed in large modules, manufactured in factories offsite, transported in and bolted together onsite, therefore reducing the onsite labour footprint. This technique allows for overseas manufacturing if using local fabricators is not a viable option.
Technip has also been working, through its long term graduate programme, to ensure a continuous flow of high quality engineering graduates into the industry and overseeing their training and career development. Over the past seven years, the company has built a close working relationship with the University of Western Australia whose engineering department is geared to the needs of the oil and gas industry; and the University of Tasmania, which specialises in subsea construction. “We generally recruit between 10 and 15 graduates a year and guide them through training and career development.”
The scheme has certainly found favour with undergraduates. This year alone, the company received over 1,000 applications for just 10 graduate placements. Once appointed, the graduates take part in a carefully designed training programme managed jointly by the HR department and departmental managers, which provides them with a set of learning experiences and assesses them on their performance. The upshot is that Technip has an attractive engineering career structure which helps ensure that graduates remain interested in the job and stay with the company in the long term.
Technip engineers also have the stimulus of becoming involved in some groundbreaking engineering challenges. Current work includes providing the front-end engineering and design for what may well become the world’s first floating LNG liquefaction plant for the Shell Prelude Project. The company is also working on the front-end engineering design for a massive 35,000 ton fixed offshore platform for the Chevron Wheatstone Project in Western Australia. “If it does go ahead it will be the largest such platform in Australia,” Roozendaal says. “It’s an enormous technical challenge, and we’re very keen to continue working on it.”
One of the most prestigious projects that Technip is currently engaged in is the Gorgon Project. Gorgon is Australia’s largest LNG project to date, and is an enormous subsea development for which Technip is providing engineering and procurement support as well as the subsea work linking the well with the onshore gas facility at Barrow Island.
The ability to verify a good safety record or environmental performance is becoming more and more important. From the environmental, economic and social sustainability viewpoint, Technip has great credentials. It is listed on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, a strictly audited and verified league table that identifies the best performing 10 per cent of the largest 2,500 companies listed on the Dow Jones Global Total Stock Market Index. These sustainability principles permeate every aspect of company operations. Health and safety, meanwhile, is driven through every aspect of the business via a clearly defined training programme, Pulse, that begins at the top with training for the leaders, and is cascaded through the business. This spans everything from operational safety practices and contractor/supplier performance through to engineering safety into a project from the initial design stage.
Looking to the future, as exploration and development opportunities increase in Australia and New Zealand, competition in the marketplace is going to intensify. “All of our competitors now have either a sales office or fully fledged operation here and there are strong established local players, so we have strong competition, but I think this is always healthy in any industry,” Roozendaal says.
The company is currently bidding on a number of new contracts. “If we are successful in the contracts we’re pursuing, then we will see significant growth in terms of our employees, and also our revenue over the next three years,” he concludes. Backed by strong internal practices and the support of a powerful global group, there is no doubt that Technip Oceania will be playing a major role at the epicentre of Australia’s rapidly expanding oil and gas industry. www.technip.com/en/entities/australia
