People
Petrolia NOCO AS has appointed Linn Katrine Høie as managing director.
Noreco has appointed Euan Shirlaw as CFO.
ONGC has appointed Rajesh Kumar Srivastava as exploration director.
Ashit Jain has resigned as CEO of Kreuz Subsea.
Paal Kibsgaard has joined Borr Drilling as the new chairman of the board.
Deep Down Inc. has named Charles Njuguna as CEO and a member of the board of directors. He succeeds Ronald Smith, founder and CEO, who has resigned to pursue interests outside the oil and gas industry.
Timipre Silva has been named Minister of Petroleum in Nigeria.
Wood has appointed Paul Leonard as president of Operations Services in its Americas business.
StormGeo has appointed Søren Andersen as CEO. Interim CEO Henrik Dahl has reassumed his role as non-executive director on the board of directors.
Ian Bramson has joined ABS as global head of cyber security.
SAExploration Holdings Inc. has named Michael Faust as chairman of the board and Kevin Hubbard as interim CFO.
WFS Technologies has appointed Jim Darroch as chief technology officer.
Elizabeth Paull has joined Chelsea Technologies as managing director.
Nigel Shewring has joined Hempel as group director of Research & Development.
Xodus Group has appointed David Kennare as new field development director for Asia/Pacific, and Djamel Hamel and Chris Overton as principal consultants.
Zenith Energy has appointed Paddy O’Donnell as business development manager, Warwick Sanderson as senior drilling engineer, Tom McIntyre as drilling engineer, and Mel Harvey as QHSE advisor.
Dr. Heiner Lang has joined the Executive Board of Bosch Rexroth AG.
Helix Energy Solutions Group Inc. has appointed Amy Nelson to its board of directors.
Mission Secure Inc. has named Don Ward as senior vice president of Global Services.
PJ Valves has appointed Phil Vosper as business development manager in Hertford, to support its ongoing growth in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Prodrill Energy Resource Solutions has named Drew Alexander as client relationship director and a board member, and Bob Watt as senior technical resource specialist.
XL Group has appointed Colin Laird as UK sales director and Richard Dodunski as group operations director.
GTMaritime has hired Keng Teen Phang as head of sales for Asia/Pacific.
Sarah McGavin has rejoined Deloitte as an audit director.
The University of Manchester has appointed Dr. Robert Eden, managing director of UK-based Rawwater Engineering Co. Ltd., as an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Science and Engineering, within the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.
Company News
Saipem says it will establish a spoolbase on Greenwood Island, Pascagoula, Mississippi. With a focus on the Gulf of Mexico, the new spoolbase will support the Saipem Constellation, an ultra-deepwater rigid and flexible pipelay, heavy lift, and construction DP-3 vessel. Under a long-term agreement, the spoolbase will be in a dedicated area within the facilities of ST Engineering Halter Marine & Offshore Inc. It will be equipped with welding machines, non-destructive testing facilities, and field joint coating systems. It will also be structured to deal with complex projects such as pipe-in-pipe and HDPE liners.
Chrysaor has extended Peterson’s integrated logistics services agreement in the North Sea by 18 months, with options for three further one-year extensions. Peterson will support all Chrysaor’s North Sea assets, providing warehousing, transport and marine services, and supplying eight offshore materials controllers for the Armada, North Everest, and Lomond production platforms. Work will be serviced from the company’s bases in Altens and Edzell, with around 50,000 metric tons of cargo set to move through the Torry Marine Base.
ROVOP has joined the ORCA (Offshore Robotics for Certification of Assets) Hub. This is a consortium of five universities – Heriot-Watt University, University of Edinburgh, University of Liverpool, University of Oxford, and Imperial College London – that are working together to develop highly specialized robotics and AI technologies for the inspection, repair, maintenance and certification of offshore energy platforms and assets. The partnership will see ROVOP support the research the ORCA Hub is carrying out in the subsea domain. This will include the sharing of knowledge, information and expertise in subsea operations, the use of equipment and facilities for trialling ORCA Hub research in operational environments, and the collaborative development of research projects.
Trelleborg’s marine and infrastructure operation has relocated its headquarters and Dubai marine fender sales operation to Jafza One, a new commercial complex in the Jebel Ali Free Zone, Dubai, UAE.
Through a seven-year technology collaboration, Woodside Energy will deploy enterprise-wide Schlumberger’s DELFI cognitive E&P environment. This will give 200 global petrotechnical users at Woodside full access to the DELFI environment, including the Petrotechnical Suite, the Planning Suite, and the developer capability for further collaborative innovation projects.
GATE Energy has opened an office in Singapore. This is the company’s first office outside of the US.
Archer Oiltools and DART Technologies (DARTT) have agreed to co-operate globally on digital well integrity solutions. Over the past four years, DARTT, based in Perth, Australia, has serviced rigs, intervention vessels and onshore facilities, with the DARTT Recorder providing an estimated 15,000 days of infield pressure testing.
Gazprom Neft is using a new computing cluster in St Petersburg to support oil and gas projects in Russia’s Arctic regions. The facility, designed to generate digital twins of oil fields, is said to provide an intra-node data transmission rate above many existing Russian supercomputers, with the new distributed computing capable of processing more than 100 Gbit/s. The new supercomputer has demonstrated a performance of at least 16 teraflops in pilot testing, equivalent to 160 conventional computers.
ADNOC has awarded contracts with a combined value of AED13.2 billion ($3.6 billion) for the procurement of casing and tubing for the company’s drilling programs. The recipients are Consolidated Suppliers Establishment, representing Tenaris; Abu Dhabi Oilfield Services Co., representing Vallourec; and Habshan Trading Co., representing Marubeni Corp. The program includes more than AED367 million ($100 million) in foreign direct investment over the next five years to establish a state-of-the-art oil country tubular goods threading plant and repair center in Abu Dhabi, along with a training academy to enhance local expertise. In total the three contractors will supply 1 MM metric tons (1.1 MM tons) of casing and tubing over five years.
Transocean has awarded PSW Group a five-year contract to provide storage and maintenance of BOPs and related equipment for the contractor’s Cat-D rigs. PSW has invested in a new 10,000-sq m (107,639-sq ft) facility for BOP-related services in Mongstad, western Norway. This features a test pit, a combined crane capacity of 240 tons, and a stack-up height of 18.5 m (61 ft). It should be operational in October.
Shearwater has established a new Brazilian subsidiary Shearwater GeoServices do Brasil Ltda and opened a new office in Rio de Janeiro.
TGS-NOPEC Geophysical Co. ASA has completed its acquisition of Spectrum ASA.
Drillinginfo has changed its name to Enverus.
BP has awarded FMS a three-year contract to provide mooring equipment for its North Sea operations. The contract was due to take effect in July.
CannSeal has entered the US market through an exclusive agreement with Renegade Services. The new partnership will see Renegade Services market and operate CannSeal’s technology across the US and Gulf of Mexico.
RigNet has signed two multi-year agreements with Transocean. It is providing rig analytic applications through Intelie Live, the company’s real-time analytics platform, to help improve operational integrity and efficiency. The platform is currently deployed on more than a dozen of Transocean’s ultra-deepwater rigs with plans to expand to the entire fleet by the end of 2019.
The company has also signed a multi-year agreement with Valaris plc. Under this agreement, it will continue to provide managed communication services including VSAT technology and RigNet’s Gulf of Mexico 5GE network and the fleet-wide rollout of its global multi-band LTE service.
Allseas has acquired Bluerise, a developer of ocean thermal energy conversion technology that delivers renewable energy solutions.
Sparrows Group has won its first contract from BP to provide deck operations services to field facilities on the UK continental shelf. This scope of work will involve Sparrows’ deck crew perform multiple roles including load handler and banksman/slinger to support lifting operations and undertake bulk handling and management of all cargo on the platforms.
Acteon subsidiary Claxton has agreed to acquire Proserv’s international Field Technology Services and Survey business divisions. The former provides cutting, friction stud welding and pipeline maintenance services from bases in Stavanger, Houma, Louisiana, Singapore, and Aberdeen. Acteon plans to integrate the services and facilities under the Claxton brand, complementing the latter’s decommissioning, riser and conductor and surface pressure control capabilities. The Survey business unit will join Acteon’s existing UTEC Survey business.
Baker Hughes, a GE company (BHGE) has opened a new research facility at Dhahran Techno Valley. According to Saudi Aramco, this will host development of various technologies, including the first industry 3D printer for metal in Saudi Arabia and a data visualization and automation platform to help simulate and optimize well activity and construction. One expected feature of the new facility will be a visualization laboratory equipped with a digital learning, visualization and automation platform. It will be able to absorb data from multiple sources to create a digital twin of a planned well, which should in turn allow well planners to run multiple predictive simulations and workflows to optimize the construction process.
BHGE is also forming a joint venture with C3.ai. This will combine BHGE’s fullstream oil and gas offering with C3.ai’s AI software to deliver digital transformation technologies to improve productivity for the oil and gas industry.
Gazprom 335 has opened a Far Eastern branch on Russky Island off Vladivostok on the Russian east coast. Its new branch will support the group’s projects in Russia’s Far East, coordinating R&D, designing individual components of structures and equipment for subsea hydrocarbon production systems, gas processing and LNG production facilities, and forming collaborations for robotic systems.
Motive Offshore Group has launched Motive Personnel – a division specifically created to provide offshore technicians to its global customer base.
