Unlocking the full value of energy assets: Petrofac

Petrofac is a leading service provider to the oil and gas production and processing industry. The company builds, operates and maintains oil and gas facilities, with a reputation for commitment, delivery and operational excellence. Petrofac delivers a range of innovative, commercial models which can be aligned to an individual client, project or asset. This has enabled Petrofac to respond to the distinct needs of each client and help them to enhance the value of their assets across the oil and gas life cycle. Petrofac’s service offering is underpinned by its provision of skills training with competency development and assurance frameworks. Engineering expertise is at the heart of everything at Petrofac. The teams provide a full suite of engineering services including conceptual and feasibility studies and front-end engineering and design through detailed design for both onshore and offshore facilities.

Making a difference for more than three decades

2017 marks 36 years in business for Petrofac – and we have certainly come a long way. Petrofac started life in 1981 with just 25 people on board. Today we are a robust global business with around 13,500 employees.

Over the years, we have always remained focused on our clients, operational excellence and supporting the market’s changing needs. Here we look back on some of the milestones in our history; the key moments that have created the Petrofac you see today.

­How Petrofac works

Over the past 36 years, Petrofac has built a strong reputation for commitment, delivery and operational excellence. Its diverse client portfolio includes many of the world’s leading integrated, independent and national oil and gas companies. Petrofac provides its clients with a range of services and capabilities that are recognised as consistently high quality. From the moment it is decided to bid on a project, the discipline begins. Risks are identified from the outset to ensure a clear understanding of project complexity, and in maintaining risk management rigour each step of the way.

At Petrofac, operational excellence is about constantly questioning what it does, and how it does it, in order to drive continuous improvement and maintain a competitive edge. In particular, engineers have found new ways to take cost and complexity out of projects by driving value engineering: using new construction techniques, challenging conventional wisdom, and making better use of automation – while still delivering on client demands for quality and certainty.

Services offered

Petrofac provides a plethora of design and engineering services across the lifecycles of oil and gas assets. Here are a few of its prominent services:

Engineering and Construction

Engineering & Construction (E&C) delivers onshore and offshore engineering, procurement, construction, installation and commissioning projects. Petrofac delivers E&C projects on a lump-sum basis and offers a variety of commercial models that are tailored to meet its clients’ needs. With 35 years of expertise in this area, its services encompasses both Greenfield and brownfield developments.

Engineering and Production

Engineering & Production Services (EPS) brings together Petrofac’s reimbursable service capability across brownfield and Greenfield projects. Services range from concept, feasibility and front-end engineering and design (FEED) studies as well as operations, maintenance, training, competency, well engineering,asset management and decommissioning.

Integrated Energy Services (IES)

Petrofac’s projects cover upstream developments - both Greenfield and brownfield, related energy infrastructure projects, and can include investment. IES deploys the Group’s capabilities to meet the individual needs of its clients, using a range of commercial frameworks, including: Production Enhancement Contracts, Risk Service Contracts and Traditional Equity Upstream Investment models, including Production Sharing Contracts and concession agreements.

Safety and safe design; in Group Chief Executive Ayman Asfari’s words

We are committed to protecting our people, our clients and the communities we work in, and the assets we design, build, operate and maintain. The management of Health, Safety, Security, the Environment and Asset Integrity are fundamental to the way we work, and are central to our unique, delivery-focused culture. This is why our Lost Time Injury (LTI) frequency rate and our recordable incident rate are significantly less than the industry average.

The record: Its focus is to measure, monitor and reduce incidents and events that have the greatest potential to cause serious harm to our people, the environment, our assets and our business. We also acknowledge important achievements in safety performance such as long periodsof time during which no LTIs occur.

Awards and Accreditations

Petrofac was ranked second in Oil & Gas Middle East magazine’s Top 30 EPC Contractors list for 2017

Petrofac secured the Learning Technology Award at the 10th annual global Getenergy Awards in London

Petrofac was recognised as Sharjah Top 10 business at shjSEEN awards ceremony 2016

Petrofac was named in the top 30 employers for Omani graduates

Petrofac in the field

Petrofac designed and executed the rig-less permanent abandonment of two gas condensate wells for Tullow Oil on the Horne & Wren Normally Unmanned Installation (NUI) in the Southern North Sea. Through the use of innovative techniques, a direct cost saving of more than US$2.6 million was achieved.

Delivering the project: Petrofac’s well engineering experts installed a suite of intervention equipment (including coiled tubing, slickline, cementing and surface bleed off services) on the deck of a self-propelled, self-elevating Jack Up Lift Barge (JULB) positioned alongside the NUI and interfaced with the NUI top deck.

All of this equipment had to be carefully placed to fit on the small platform with a footprint of 7m x 8m and a maximum platform structural load limit of 40MT. The small platform footprint created a challenging working environment with significant manual handling associated with scaffolding activities and multiple rigging of different services equipment between phases and wells.

A combination barrier cement plug was then placed above the lower reservoir sections in each well. This was accomplished by setting a mechanical bridge plug base on slickline just inside the top of the liner screen packer, followed by an 800ft+ cement plug placed with coiled tubing.

During casing recovery 15MT of deck equipment was required and 25MT of string weight had to be recovered. To overcome this challenge casing recovery was performed by tandem lifting, using the JULB crane and hydraulic jacks around the wellhead, allowing a force greater than that which the platform could withstand to be applied to the casings.

The intervention equipment was then used to place an environmental barrier cement plug above the uppermost permeable formation, using a 9 5/8” mechanical bridge plug as a base inside the 9 5/8” casing, prior to perforating above it to establish communication with the 9 5/8” x 13 3/8” annulus. An innovative stand-alone abrasive cutting and tubular recovery system was used to both cut and recover all three casings (20”, 13 3/8” and 9 5/8”) from 10ft below the mud line (290ft of tubulars).

An additional challenge was the need to control project costs associated with deploying multi-skilled crews from a single service company over multiple services and integrating with the support service crews. This required detailed management, particularly from a control of work and safety management perspective.

Throughout the project the onshore and offshore team worked in a highly integrated and innovative manner, seeking continual performance improvement by challenging the critical path and optimizing rig-ups and activity scheduling in order to deliver the safest and most time efficient solution.

Putting safety first: No environmental incidents, no injuries and no damage to equipment occurred while operating multiple well services equipment and crews within a limited JULB and platform deck space. Through effective project HSEQ planning and a project safety day the project successfully interfaced with the JULB safety observation programme, and saw participation improve by some 400% in comparison to the rest of the vessel owners’ active fleet.

Key results: Petrofac delivered a successful well abandonment and pre-decommissioning project outcome, meeting Oil & Gas UK, Tullow and Petrofac standards. This included:

• Integrated delivery of a project specific oil pollution emergency plan
• Combined operations safety management system interface and emergency response manual
• Hazard identification and operations reviews required to deliver Notification of Combined Operations to the Regulator

More than US$2.5 million of cost savings were achieved for Tullow Oil through using a jack up lift barge rather than a jack up rig, and utilizing an innovative pipe recovery technique instead of a heavy lift vessel. In addition 5.5 days of critical path time were saved through preparation work for successful simultaneous operations and optimization of the scaffolding and platform grating work.

Masterbrain behind Petrofac: Ayman Asfari

Ayman joined the Group in 1991 to establish Petrofac International, of which he was CEO. In 2005, he led the successful initial public listing of the Company. He has more than 35 years’ experience in the oil and gas industry. He formerly worked as MD of a major civil and mechanical construction business in Oman. Ayman has a distinguished record with strong operational leadership skills and international focus. He has extensive business development skills, a wealth of oil and gas industry knowledge and a clear strategic vision.

Ayman is founder and chairman of the Asfari Foundation. He is a member of the board of trustees of the American University of Beirut, and of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is also a Business Ambassador for the UK Prime Minister, and a member of the Chatham House Senior Panel of Advisors. Apart from these, he is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in recognition of his outstanding and continuing contribution to the field.

"Our success rests on building trusted, long-term client relationships, while focus remains on delivering first class project execution, cost control and effective risk management."