Technip Oceania

Technip, a world leader in project management, engineering and construction for the energy industry, is particularly busy in Australia, where its local entity Technip Oceania is keeping its finger on the pulse.

When you are prospecting for oil the last thing you want is excitement. There are pockets of oil and gas around the world but some of them are unpredictable to say the least. Australia is an area of low sovereign risk. “Down here,” says Technip Oceania’s managing director Frans Roozendaal, “we are seen as eminently politically stable, and in our industry that is a good thing. It attracts our customers, the companies that make their money by supplying the world with energy—dependably.”

You can see his point. The Australians have their moments but volatile they are not. But that is not to say they are inert either: their mining exploits are legendary and their expertise in resource exploitation has been exported round the world. And they have made their mark in the burgeoning oil and gas industry. Technip has been in Perth, Western Australia, for 16 years and reports to the Kuala Lumpur office which is Technip’s regional headquarters in Asia Pacific. Technip’s Oceania organisation employs 650 people and is one of only a few Technip offices worldwide that operate in all of the Group’s three business segments: subsea, offshore and onshore.

Around 180 of these people work in the subsea discipline, everyone a qualified and skilled engineer. These are mainly locals, reflecting Australia’s excellent vocational education base. “We have a successful graduate programme,” says Roozendaal. “Every year we can take on about 10 graduates, mostly from subsea backgrounds. This year we had 1,200 applicants for those 10 places so it is difficult to choose the right people from the various universities that we cooperate with.” Applicants come from many different institutions including the Melbourne Institute of Technology and the University of Western Australia. The University of Tasmania actually runs a degree course in subsea structures, so not surprisingly that tends to be a source of talent for Technip.

And it is no secret in the wider Technip Group that the subsea team based in Perth is outstanding. It must be unique for a company to be able to run so many major programmes at the same time. But this year, Technip Oceania found itself engaged in installing the underwater risers and flowlines for an FPSO (floating production storage and offloading) vessel off Western Australia; installing 23 kilometres of pipeline in the Timor Sea; and working on several other key projects in the region. “That gives an idea of the breadth and skill of our organisation; that we are capable of doing these major mobilisations at the same time, and managing all those operations from one entity in Australia.”

On the subsea side, Technip has recently ordered a new construction and installation vessel that will be commissioned in early 2013. “This is a state-of-the-art ship, specially designed for the work that is being done in the Asia Pacific region, and it has fantastic capabilities,” says Roozendaal. “We are very keen to get it into operation—we are already bidding it for several projects that are in the pipeline.” Recently named the Deep Orient, the 135-metre vessel is being built at Vigo in Spain: it can work at depths up to 3,000 metres, carries two ROVs, and has accommodation for 120 people.

The new ship is just the latest investment in the region by Technip. Last year saw the opening of Asiaflex Products, Technip’s third flexible pipe and umbilical manufacturing facility, on a 20 hectare site at Johor Bahru in Malaysia. This is now nearing full production and can manufacture up to 200 kilometres of product per year. “This facility is bringing significant benefit to the region and in particular Australia, because the time to market is a lot shorter and we don’t have the lengthy transportation runs from Europe,” he says.

The Asiaflex Products site links to its own dock with a dedicated 130 metre quay, and a 300 tonne crane providing facilities for the region’s deepwater installation vessels, making mobilisation more cost and time effective. “We recently carried out our first mobilisation at the new facility. It makes everything so much easier when you have everything under your own control; your own dock, cranes and personnel. You have much better access to facilities there, and can use them in the way you want to. We are assessing whether to extend the site with rigid facilities; there is a lot of demand for rigid spooled pipelaying in our region, especially for in-field work.” Another vessel joining the Technip fleet is the 195-metre Deep Energy—one of the largest reeled pipelay vessels ever built and adding to the capability that Technip has built up over 50 years. As well as being bigger, it is faster, capable of up to 20 knots in transit and able to handle rigid pipe of up to 18 inches.

Technip is getting ready for a real boom in activity among its Australian customers, who are drilling new wells as if they were going out of fashion. “There have been some big finds in Australian and adjacent waters, with some of the most important ones reaching or close to final investment decisions.” Chevron, for example, has recently made the final investment decision to go ahead with its 8.9 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) Wheatstone LNG project, which Technip Oceania has taken from pre-FEED to FEED over recent years. Japan’s Inpex is widely expected to publish its decision on the multi-billion dollar Ichthys project by the end of 2011.

The potential for LNG production and downstream processing in the region is enormous, and Technip is closely involved at every stage. In May, Technip and its construction partner Samsung won the contract to design and construct the world’s first floating LNG facility, on Shell’s Prelude gas field 200 kilometres off thenorth-west coast of Australia. 

To give an idea of its scale, this will be the largest floating offshore facility in the world, 488 metres long. Fully loaded it will weigh around 600,000 tonnes, and of that 260,000 tonnes will consist of steel—about five times the amount used to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Detailed design of the facility will be undertaken by TSC at Technip’s operating centres in Paris and Kuala Lumpur, and it will be built at the Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) shipyard in Geoje, Korea. “Technip Oceania will certainly have its part to play in the Prelude FLNG project; and there are many others on the drawing board that we are hoping to contribute to.”

Roozendaal’s job is nothing if not varied. The company is an installation contractor, a management contractor and an EPC contractor, and is currently executing projects in all three of its business segments.Even with 650 personnel it couldn’t hope to manage so many projects with its own resources, so Technip Oceania often works with one or two other Technip operating centres, most frequently the Kuala Lumpur office. The Technip Group employs 25,000 people around the world, and can direct adequate resources to its most active regions, and the Australian market is likely to be one of the most active for some time to come. www.technip.com