FEATURE: ABERDEEN
Image: Norman Adams - Aberdeen City Council
provider that was 100 per cent focused on ROVs. For many of our competitors, ROVs are a sideline and as a result they do not always provide the best service. We only do one thing, but we do it very well.” Demand for ROVs is growing fast as ageing North Sea infrastructure requires ever more maintenance, offshore wind farms are being built all across northern Europe and oil companies search for oil in increasingly challenging deep water environments.
Sophisticated and modern ROVs are expensive pieces of kit and launching a high tech company requires financial backing. Aberdeen’s banking, finance and legal sectors are geared up to work with the oil industry. Steven says, “Raising finance is undoubtedly a challenge in the current financial markets, but with a proven management team and strong, well informed financial backers, we have been able to deliver the necessary funding.”
The application of Operational Excellence
Every year UK North Sea operators see an average 30 per cent level of production deferment. This lost production, which is often referred to as the phantom oilfield, equates to billions of dollars in lost revenues and can represent a sizeable chunk of an operator’s portfolio.
Operational Excellence (OPEX) Group was formed in Aberdeen in 2010 to address this challenge by working to eliminate production losses and unplanned breakdowns.
6 Oil&GasCONNECT
OPEX Vice President Gerry Ward is on a mission to reverse this persistent downward trend of loss. He says, “OPEX provide absolute focus on this aspect of an operators’ activity. There is an overwhelming desire within our customers to release this potential and in OPEX we possess the skills and technologies to create improvement.”
“We do this through building a performance picture of an operation through the various data streams that exist within production processes and identify the principal causes of
In the last 40 years Aberdeen has
transformed to become the European centre for the oil and gas industry.
recurring failure. We can drill down to identify the root cause of failure. We turn what has been a reactive ‘after the event’ environment into one which is more proactive and which prevents loss from occurring.”
OPEX uses proprietary technologies, developed in–house, to provide real time monitoring of equipment. Combined with customers’ existing production process and machinery data from their infrastructure, this creates the opportunity to drive performance improvement.
“Our multi-disciplined engineering teams combine what we believe to be class leading technology with a practical approach, that allows us to generate action plans that steadily improve performance,” added Gerry.
OPEX is a dynamic business started in 2010 that has attracted serious interest from its customers. Whilst the primary focus is on the UK sector OPEX has already embarked on its first international project where the same issues relating to loss elimination exist on a global level.
Technology transfer broadens the scope of Aberdeen’s energy interests.
In the last 40 years Aberdeen has transformed to become the European centre for the oil and gas industry. As well as servicing the North Sea offshore industry, it is increasingly providing high end services and technology to the industry internationally. Looking to the future, there are opportunities for technology transfer into offshore renewables. Aberdeen is home to a European Offshore Wind Deployment project being developed by Vattenfall, Technip and Aberdeen Renewable Energy Group (AREG) which will trial new offshore turbines. Aberdeen is making waves in other energy fields and is going to have Europe’s largest hydrogen bus fleet, which will start operating in 2014. There are exciting developments underway as Aberdeen’s innovation spreads across the spectrum of the energy sector.
WWW.THECONNECTSERIES.CO.UK
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116