Is the Era of Oil and Gas Megaprojects Over?

Grant MacDonald  |  October 18, 2017

Contractor Witheld has made some very pertinent observations and comments. With the recent O & G downturn, a lot of experienced people have gone from the industry, are not likely to return and will be replaced with cheaper, younger but academically qualified engineers and managers. Its this new crop of engineers & managers who will not have the advantage of valuable experience gained through many years that will be tasked with executing the projects of the future. That, along with overly verbose & contradicting client specifications and contracts that have resulted from the "cut & paste" mentality so common amongst today's clients and contractors will only increase the chance of a project, no matter how big or small, to fail.

Mohd Fairuz Bin Idris  |  February 26, 2017

This is rich people's money game.... make it low...buy all... then sell when high... get richer...

William Wagner  |  February 08, 2017

Will most of the heaving lifting associated with off-shore equipment be leveraged in off-shore wind turbine installation and maintenance?

Contractor Witheld  |  February 02, 2017

We engineers in design engineering companies have always understood the cost impact on equipment suppliers of specifying a client’s preferred accessories and idiosyncratic requirements on packaged equipment but the clients never have. There is no doubt that significant cost saving will be made using standard equipment not only in CAPEX but OPEX too. However, I have to take exception to belief that ‘visibility’ during a detail design will be beneficial. In a career spanning 40 years I have seen oil companies strip themselves of their engineering departments that were full of pragmatic and sometimes enigmatic ex contracting engineers who had great foresight that only experience can give to be replaced with a new guard of the technically highly qualified. The client’s fit for purpose mentality has been replaced with a nit picking jobsworth application of every word of every specification piled onto the poor suppliers. We don’t send paper to vendors anymore it’s all pdf’s as the paper is too big and bulky. There is so much to read often the vendors don’t, they just don’t have the time or resources. They rely on us to review the bid and condition it so that the omissions can be added to make a level playing field. Then there is the issue of design change. I know some contractors have in the past always under bid the original design contract to secure it as they know the weakness of their clients. Anyone who has had a builder in their house should understand the word ‘change’ but it’s on a whole different scale. It’s what contracting is about, it’s the place where the money is made, costs escalate and schedules scuppered. The contractor will get the blame for any wound self-inflicted by the client but the contractor is only trying get out of that hole he got in to get the job, make a profit and ensure his survival. I think it’s also true to say management at high level in clients have no appreciation of how to select an ideal candidate to be their project manager. Because the ideal source, the client’s in house engineering team, is limited and preferring to promote within the company the client is forced to look elsewhere. How many times have we had to suffer a client project manager that comes from an operations or unrelated background? You don’t appoint a bus driver to be in charge of the bus design, you might ask him for his ideas but not be in charge of the engineering as he does not have the right experience. The next bus driver will have different ideas anyway! Nobody likes working on a bad project, on our CVs we try to be sure what we were doing can’t be seen as contributory to the disaster. And there has been a few in the recent past like Yme and the more infamous Cash All Gone. The other sad thing is that whoever was at the top of the pyramid and can never be considered 100% innocent is likely to be promoted. How can a client’s project manager report that the job is a failure or that there has been mismanagement of any of the of contractors below him? It will never happen, no matter how bad a project is it will always be a success for the company and failures will be somebody else’s fault, unless of course the client project manager and his team want early redundancy. We know so many times the truth is perverted when it goes to the top, it costs us reputation all the time. The best job a client will ever get is if they specify their requirements well at the beginning i.e. spend time and money on a good FEED and good specs. Select a decent design contractor where you understand the ethos of the management, not the lowest bid or one that wants to maximise their profit by employing labour from a totally unknown pool. Then, let us get on with it, keep changes and client interference to a minimum. We may not produce exactly what the client expected but we’ll be pretty close with a reasonable schedule and budget. It used to work in the past without all this micro management. When the industry was in a slump I was involved in a building project with other oil & gas engineers where the builder travelled from one side of the UK to the other. It was a slightly specialist building and was going to profitable for the builder. At the end of the job he said to me he had never worked on a job like it before and I asked why. He told me he hadn’t lost money but hadn’t made much either and he couldn’t believe he had had only one change. There are engineers and designers out there who can and want to do this for an oil and gas client but we need everything above us to be in place, then we will deliver.