Investing in people and projects across Middle East

Graham Horn, senior vice president for Surface International at TechnipFMC, talks about increasing the firm’s regional capabilities

What are your aims at this year’s ADIPEC?

For TechnipFMC, ADIPEC this year is all about committing ourselves to helping our customers in the Middle East improve the economics of their projects. We must continue our efforts to be efficient and effective in delivering a world class service to our customers.

We have invested heavily with our partner GASOS in a large service centre in ICAD in Abu Dhabi, which supports all of our service activities in the UAE. These include machining, weld cladding, gas testing, pump testing, torqueing and in-house painting, as well as a dedicated training centre.

The second expansion phase will occur during ADIPEC week with the opening of a dedicated space for the manufacturing of compact, modular integrated skids and a large warehouse for customer inventory management. We also have invested in a full-service campus in Dammam, Saudi Arabia with a manufacturing shop for machining, welding, hydro and gas testing wellheads and other equipment and a dedicated space for integrated skid manufacturing.

We also have plans for a service centre, training centre and warehouse for inventory management. More importantly, we continue to invest in the people of the region. We have significantly increased our Middle East capabilities with a fully functional service and customer support team, a commercial team and an engineering team.

We also support local schools and universities and are excited about the success we are already seeing with our gender diversity programme.

We continue to work to understand our customers’ challenges and provide the most cost-effective solutions. We believe our integrated solutions from tree to pipeline onshore and offshore can deliver significant savings. And we continue to explore digital technologies that can tell us when intervention is needed to avoid expensive shutdowns.

Tell us about your stand. Are you launching any new products or services?

When launching new products and services, we have one theme that remains the same: Helping our customers improve their project economics. The products and services TechnipFMC plans to launch at ADIPEC will be focused on delivering and adapting technology to the Middle East that supports unconventionals.

We also will be focusing on recruiting new talent as part of our localisation commitment to the region.

How did you find ADIPEC last year?

ADIPEC is very worthwhile. It is unique in the way many senior oil and gas executives actively participate and provide valuable industry feedback and insights that help us manage our strategy in the Middle East.

What emergent technologies are helping transform the oil and gas industry – what innovations are you bringing to the industry?

In drilling and completion, we are focused on improved metal sealing solutions capable of handling the more extreme gas production prevalent in the region. This technology will provide gas solutions and help make oil fields safer and protect the environment. There is an increased interest in the region for unconventionals. As a market leader in frac, flowline, manifolds, trees and pumps, we can provide fully integrated service packages to support frac injection and flowback, including sand and proppant management. For well sites, we offer single and multi-well integrated skid solutions that deliver innovative ways to facilitate hook-ups on the well-pad.

We leverage critical components and condition performance monitoring to digitise these skids and make them easier to operate and more reliable. For older fields with water management issues, we offer advanced technologies to separate water from oil and economical solutions for reinjecting the water.

For marginal fields offshore, we deliver integrated, modular solutions that provide everything our customers need to develop fields under a single contract without needing to run Pre-FEED and FEED studies.

What is your outlook for your oil and gas business in the region?

We are excited about the oil and gas business in the region. The Middle East continues to drill new wells and seek better ways to maintain production rates from mature facilities. With the demand for gas continuing to grow, the region clearly has a large role to play. Most exciting is seeing the younger generation playing a more active role in shaping the business in the region.