Business Briefs

Jan. 16, 2020
The latest personnel changes and company news for the offshore oil and gas industry.

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BHP has appointed Mike Henry as CEO. He succeeds Andrew Mackenzie.

CNOOC Ltd. has appointed Xu Keqiang as CEO and Wang Dongjin as chairman and chairman of the Nomination Committee.

Seadrill Ltd. has selected Glen Ole Rødland to succeed John Fredriksen as chairman. In addition, Harald Thorstein has stepped down as non-executive director, and Gunnar Winther Eliassen has been appointed as non-executive director.

Delek Group has appointed Idan Wallace as CEO. He succeeds Asaf Bartfeld, who has retired after serving the company for more than 30 years.

The Shearwater GeoServices board of directors has appointed Robert Hobbs as chairman. He replaces Karl-Johan Gombrii, who has been the chair of the board since the company’s inception in 2016.

Tony O’Reilly has stepped down as CEO of Providence Resources P.l.c. and has resigned from the board (and all subsidiaries). In the interim, his executive functions will be assumed on a temporary basis by Pat Plunkett, chairman.

Tidewater Inc. has elected Larry T. Rigdon as chairman of the board. He replaces Dr. Thomas R. Bates, Jr. In addition, the board has appointed Randee E. Day as chairwoman of the Nominating & Governance Committee, Louis A. Raspino as chairman of the Compensation Committee, and has confirmed Dick H. Fagerstal as chairman of the Audit Committee.

Borr Drilling Ltd. has reported Rune Magnus Lundetræ will step down as CFO.

Sandeep Khurana has joined Ryder Scott Petroleum as head advisor of Upstream and Midstream Integrated Services.

McDermott International Inc. has appointed Chris Krummel as executive vice president, CFO.

Crondall Energy has appointed Claude Rouxel as general manager in Asia/Pacific region.

President Donald Trump has nominated Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette to be his next energy secretary.

Hege Veiseth has resigned as CFO of Electromagnetic Geoservices ASA. The company has appointed Anders Eimstad as interim CFO.

Tata Steel has appointed Karl Haider as chief commercial officer.

Weatherford International plc has named Christian Garcia as executive vice president and CFO.

Lisa Davis has joined the Kosmos Energy board of directors.

Georges J. Lambert and Frederick Arnold have joined the Valaris board of directors.

Neodrill has appointed Tim Dallas as business development manger APAC, and Tor Odegard as business development manager Southeast Asia.

Premier Oilfield Group has hired Patrick Keenan as CEO. 

3T Energy Group has appointed Patrick Sinclair as CFO.

Akastor ASA has appointed Øyvind Paaske as CFO, effective March 1, 2020.

EnerMech has appointed Christian Brown as CEO and John Grover as strategic sales director.

Joseph L. Hooley has joined the Exxon Mobil Corp. board of directors. 

Marine Technical Limits has hired Ruairidh Hardy and Santiago Zuniga as naval architects and Liam Dey, a CAD designer.

Jonathan Ashburner and Gill Rodger have joined Xodus Group as cables and interconnectors lead and head of governance and assurance, respectively.

Alan Glen and Ahmad Al Faraj have joined Deep Casing Tools as product line manager for casing recovery systems and sales manager for the Middle East.

Gulfstream Services International has appointed Gordon Blackwood as business development director.

PJ Valves has named Kenneth Kmiec as territory leader for the Americas.

Juan Pablo Valdivieso has joined Drilling Systems as business development manager.

Motive Offshore Group has hired Richard Charles as Flexibles division manager.

Ideal Electric Co. has appointed Stephen Waite as vice president of Sales.

Matthew Rawlings has joined Peritus International as Australia Pacific regional managing director.

Jeffrey R. Wiener has joined Ocean Power Technologies Inc. as vice president of Global Sales.

John Reynolds has stepped down from the Archer Ltd. board of directors. Peter J. Sharpe has replaced him as an independent director.

Mark Fraser and Martin Webster have joined Wellpro Group as regional manager in the Middle East and regional manager in Asia, respectively.

Company News

Baker Hughes, C3.ai, and Microsoft Corp. have entered an alliance to bring enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to the energy industry on Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing platform. This alliance will enable customers to streamline the adoption of scalable AI solutions for the energy industry that help promote safety, reliability, and sustainability. It leverages the energy technology knowledge of Baker Hughes, C3.ai’s proven AI platform and applications, and the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. As a result, energy businesses are expected to have a secure and reliable suite of enterprise-scale AI applications optimized to run on Azure.

TechnipFMC has announced SpinCo will be renamed Technip Energies.

Royal Boskalis Westminster has taken full ownership of Sharjah-based geophysical/geotechnical contractor Horizon Group. Last year, Boskalis had acquired 62.5% of the shares. Horizon, formed in 2004, will continue to focus on its established markets position in the Red Sea and offshore the Arabian peninsula. It will also look to expand into the emerging offshore wind market in the Far East.

ADNOC and Group 42 (G42), an Abu Dhabi-based AI, cloud and supercomputing provider, have agreed to form a joint venture to develop and commercialize AI products for the oil and gas industry. The venture will give ADNOC access to G42’s CPU and GPU-based computing clusters, data scientists, software engineers and domain specialists in support of the NOC’s 2030 smart growth strategy. In return, G42 will gain access to ADNOC’s petabytes of archival data as it develops new AI solutions for the oil and gas industry.

Serica Energy has awarded Babcock a three-year contract to provide offshore helicopter crew transport services in the UK North Sea. Babcock will transport Serica personnel to and from the company’s Bruce field complex, 340 km (211 mi) northeast of Aberdeen, using S-92 and H175 helicopters.

Danos has launched a virtual reality (VR) competency assessment and training program for employees. The program curricula use VR software and headsets so employees can see a job site and virtually perform tasks. Trainings and assessments can take place at an office rather than traveling offshore or to a job site.

The Norwegian Competition Authority has rejected the proposed merger between Scandinavian offshore accommodation/construction support providers Prosafe and Floatel.

DeepOcean Group’s subsea trenching division has become Enshore Subsea and will be based at the Port of Blyth in northeast England.

Sparrows Group has doubled the size of its operations in the United Arab Emirates after securing contracts worth more than £55 million ($71 million) in the past three months. The awards have resulted in more than 150 new positions being created in the region and includes scopes that are said to accelerate the company’s expansion in the drilling market. The company has received a five-year award with a major E&P company and two large drilling equipment support contracts. Also, the company’s Singapore operation has achieved the American Petroleum Institute Specification Q2.

Eni is investing in a new supercomputer system. HPC5, which will triple the computing power of the existing HPC4 from 18 to 52 petaflops, equivalent to 52 million billion mathematical operations per second. As with its predecessors, HPC5, powered by Dell Technologies, is based on hybrid cluster technology (Central Processing Unit and Graphics Processing Unit). It will comprise 1,820 Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140 servers, each with two Intel Gold 6252 24-core processors and four NVIDIA V100 GPU accelerators.

Halliburton has signed a multi-year agreement with Repsol to provide a cloud-based master data management solution for exploration and production activities. Repsol will implement the cloud solution for simultaneous access and management across 10 global locations during the contract’s first year with additional locations to follow. The solution, DecisionSpace 365 Data Foundation, is said to support data residency, and can be integrated with applications and data on premise.

Sulzer has opened a new regional headquarters for pump services in Pasadena, Texas, and a service center in Balikpapan, Indonesia.

STATS Group has signed an exclusive partnership with Safari Oil & Gas in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The partnership will promote STATS’ patented range of pipeline isolation and intervention technologies.

Digital service provider Injazat has signed a memorandum of understanding with fabricator Lamprell to jointly create and market digital solutions focused on the oil and gas and renewables markets. The two companies are working on a range of technologies targeting clients primarily in the Middle East North Africa region.

Ideol and Elicio have agreed to co-develop floating wind projects offshore Scotland.

BP Egypt has appointed LOC Group as its third-party provider for marine assurance and inspection.

Danfoss and Autonomous Solutions Inc. have signed an agreement for a strategic partnership to collaborate on autonomous technology for mobile equipment applications and adjacent markets.

ABS has received the ISO 45001:2018 certificate, which demonstrates compliance with the new global standard recognizing the management system for a safe and healthy workplace.

Motive Offshore Group has acquired Pumptech.

Van Beest has moved to a new office and distribution center in Houston.