Saturday Star 2008-09-27 – Job Opportunities

September 29, 2008

Let’s see what the Star has in store for us this week:

  • Global Process Systems(GPS) is looking for engineers, among those listed are senior process eng, junior process, mech eng, structural, piping and a lot of designers. Emailand web presence available. I have the impression that GPS KL could do with a lot more growth and expertise if it wants to grow up from package suppliers to compete with the EPC boys.
  • My company, Pöyry, is advertising for people. We’re trying to go multi-discipline, hence the mess of senior positions open to you for the taking! Please join, we would be so happy, and maybe someone can teach me non-process stuff (I reaaally don’t get electrical).

Hey, is that it?

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Registration with the BEM

September 26, 2008

People have asked me about how the Board of Engineers, Malaysia (BEM) registration categories for Professional Engineers clashes with their work experience. Questions have come to me either when I’m presenting on the topic, during IEM meetings, and over the ‘Net.

For those not in the know, it’s a legal requirement to register with the Board within 6 months of starting work. There’s a form you fill up. You have to state that you want to be registered in the same field you graduated in.

Now, what happens when your work experience does not match your degree? Or you want to be apply to be professionally registered in a speciality of your discipline. Here are my thoughts:

  • You have to work with the system. If you have clout to change the system, please do so. Don’t forget the paperwork and procedures the BEM has to establish to determine whether the PE speciality is correct, which will also be applied to those applying for the traditional categories. And compare this with other systems. The IChemE only gives Corporate Membership, it doesn’t allow you to pick a specific category.
  • Do you really care what category you are registered under? The only place I’ve seen this crop up is when I have to endorse tech documents, and how many of us do that? Engineering houses would require PEs working in their own disciplines, but they would make sure their staff had the right disc. EMEPMI wouldn’t care what your PE qualifications are, or even if you were a PE.
  • For those who say that their current work has nothing to do with their BEM registration category, I say: are you sure? The classical disciplines have more leeway than you think. Material selection can be ChemE, turbine maintenance can be AeroEng, corrosion inhibitor selection can be MechE. Wrap project management around all this, and you have enough tech content to take the Professional Interview.

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Welding possible cause of Miri blast

September 24, 2008

Us in the offshore oil and gas industry know the pain and anguish if you have to do welding offshore. If welding must be done, the location is usually shut down, any potential hydrocarbon sources are purge or kept as far away from the flames and sparks, and a fire watch (with fire extinguishing equipment) must be in place during the welding activity.

Why do I mention this? Taking a page out of Malaysia’s The Star:

MIRI: The explosion that ripped apart a fuel-laden vessel in the Miri River and killed two crew members last week was possibly sparked off by human carelessness, initial investigations revealed.

A spark from welding work being done on the ship could have triggered the fire which resulted in a huge explosion at about 9am on Sept 13.

The ship, Ark 2, was berthed along the bank of the river, adjacent to a petrol-station, for servicing.

It was supposed to ferry hundreds of drums of fuel for people in the deep interior settlements.

State fire chief Mohd Shoki Hamzah said yesterday investigations and testing was still being carried out on board the wreckage to pinpoint the cause.

Miri police chief Asst Comm Jamaluddin Ibrahim said the initial probe showed that the fire and subsequent explosion happened when maintenance workers were carrying out servicing on board the ship.

“There must be strict compliance with safety measures on board such high-risk vessels,” he said.

Experts from the Sarawak and Brunei forensic departments were trying to identify a corpse found in Brunei’s Seria district, 50km from here, to determine if it was the vessel’s missing crew member Ting Huang Ung.

Ting went missing after the explosion and was believed to have been thrown into the river from the impact of the blast.

Brunei police found the body near Kuala Belait.

The other crew killed in the blast, Richard Emang, was found floating near Bintulu, 250km south of Miri two days ago.

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Fasting – Offshore Style

September 23, 2008

Taken from The Star:

For oil platform workers off Terengganu, work must go on
By NURBAITI HAMDAN

TERENGGANU: For most people, the Hari Raya holidays are the time to spend with family and friends.

But for a group of workers, the end of the fasting month will have to be marked some 240km off the Terengganu shore in the middle of the South China Sea.

They are the staff of Exxon- Mobil’s Lawit A oil platform who are tasked with ensuring that petroleum production is not disrupted.

Operations supervisor Jawead Allahrakha, 50, said whatever happens, the work must go on.

“We are sacrificing our Hari Raya so that other people in the country can celebrate,” he said, adding that 90% of the 81 platform crew are Muslims.

He will be one of 45 people who will spend the first day of Hari Raya on the oil platform.

The rest were lucky enough to get leave to celebrate at home.

Chef Hanizul Hamzah, tasked with feeding those on the platform, said a sense of duty makes him carry on.

Hanizul has never celebrated Hari Raya at home since he started working at the platform in 1999. But this year, he hopes he would be home in Kota Baru for the festivities.

“Being able to serve the crew with the best meals I could cook makes it all worth it.

“Good food makes people happy,” said the 46-year-old from Kelantan.

His main concern at the moment was making sure there was lemang and ketupat for the crew as it would just not be Hari Raya without these favourites.

For maintenance worker Sulaiman Samsudin, 55, the platform has become a second home.

“I have celebrated Hari Raya 12 times here. It was hard initially to be so far away from my family in Perak,” said Sulaiman.

He said some of the younger crew members would lock themselves in their rooms because they were too sad.

“But this is life at the platform. Being one of the seniors here, I would talk to them and try to make them feel better,” he said, describing the crew as his ‘family.’

Mechanical worker Nazman Muhammad, 35, from Kelantan, shared a way to deal with home sickness.

“The important thing is not to be alone. You need to keep yourself occupied,” he said,

Nazman said he would also re-enact the first morning of Hari Raya once he got back home onshore, even if it was the 15th day.

“With the decorations still hanging and food served, my wife and I would treat the day as if it was the first day of Aidilfitri,” he said.

(Did I mention I was part of the Lawit Design team?)

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Saturday Star 2008-09-20 – Job Opportunities

September 22, 2008

Another week, another scan of the Saturday Star newspaper. Here’s a list of job ads in the paper:

  • Shell wants you to come to a open day. Catch is, you have to invited, and you get invited by sending in your CV to SPS-AsiaXPRecruit@sheel.com. Oct 6th’s the closing date. Positions available are Instr, Elect, Subsea, Drill and Well, Struc, Process & Material, Resv, Project.
  • Murphy is looking for a deputy production manager, and a reliability engineer. CVs to be submitted here.
  • Titan Chemicals has a mess of jobs up for grabs.
  • Optimal is looking for a Kerteh-based Reliability and Electrical Engineer. Email and web presence available. A lot of people moved to Optimal when it first started up, though I think the renumeration package isn’t as good nowadays. However, it’s still better than PETRONAS because Dow Chemicals is running interference.

Can someone please join RNZ? I need them to supply me more engineers. If you have 3 years offshore experience and are available for the next 8 weeks, call me.

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Mentoring – How do you do it?

September 21, 2008

How do you mentor another engineer? As an example, the IEM has a mentoring scheme thats based around a logbook. The mentor meets up with the mentee at least once every 3 months, and reviews what the mentee has done. The mentor is meant to provide guidance as to whether the work done allows the engineer to develop.

When I go through a report, what I look for is:

  • Breadth of experience (I use the IChemE‘s report structure for this). The mentee should be exposed such as to develop her all her skills. This would mean the opportunity to explore as much as possible all engineering topics. Project management, safety, design, operations are just some of these.
  • Appreciation of engineering as a whole. A young engineer might think that running Hysys is cool, but you want them to understand why they are doing what they are doing. You don’t want to have only an technical software pilot, you do want an analysis as well. The tool is a means, not a ways.
  • Presentation of report. Engineers need to present their products. So clear writing skills and an proper flow is important. Highlighting important items and findings, and focusing on the deliverable would be something I would want to see.
  • General well-being. Is the mentee happy, is she getting enough support, is the mentor someone she wants to throw a brick at… you get the drift. The mentor should decide whether it is something she can help with, or the mentee should be able to deal with it herself with some tips of the trade.
  • Opportunity to influence exposure. You as a mentor should have enough clout to get  your mentee into projects or activities that help broaden their horizons.
  • Inspiration. It does help if you can get your mentee excited about work. Explain why they are doing the work that they do (need to build up experience, enhancing skills, exposure to client/site/software tools)

And you can do this more than once every three months, depending on the requirements. Engineers do get up and down days, you know.

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HAZOP – How do you run a Review?

September 17, 2008

(continued)

I know the title used to be HAZID, but I though I would babble on about HAZOPs.

So, what do you need for HAZOPs? At a minimum, the P&IDs. Layouts might be useful. If you want to bring in design basis data, be my guest, though what usually happens is that the consultant process engineer or delegate retrieves the data from their offices during the breaks.

You need to prepare blank HAZOP sheets that will be filled up as the review continues. Wait, that’s old school. Nowadays you have a scribe who types out whatever the review team churns out. For a greenhorn, this is a stressful job. Apart from having your mistakes broadcast for all to see, you have to keep up with what the team says, understand technical terms, and sometimes perform editing as the review goes on. If the scribe has a strong personality, they might just take over from the official facilitator.

(continued)

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Breaking into O&G Control Systems

September 16, 2008

I guess you might have heard of the Large Hadron Collider hacker break in. It made me wonder as to whether this can happen to offshore control and safety systems. Here’s my thoughts on the topic:

  • You need a doorway to hack into a system. Most (all that I’ve seen) offshore systems are standalone, and don’t have LAN, let alone Internet connections. Heck, for most of the DCS the only way you can transfer data is via 3.5″ disk (or was that 5.25″?). No USB ports, no CD drive. Maybe an RS-232 port, but you have to be on site to break in.
  • If there is a web interface, you can be pretty sure that the PC acting as a gateway has the usual bells and whistles to prevent unauthorized entry. This assumes that the link allows two way communication.
  • Even if you found a door, the architecture of a DCS is pretty specialised. Those who have hacked Windows, Macs, Linux systems will find their knowledge useless here. You won’t find published available APIs, object structures, weak kinks in the software, even a typical programming language. It’s all process loops, logic controls, and stuff. There’s no need to support third party development because, well there is no third party.
  • You might just get into the DCS, but the worst you can do is shutdown the platform. All the safety stuff is handle by the safety systems, which have triple redundancy, programmed PLCs, etc. I’d like to see someone hack remotely into that.

BTW, the above comments are based on my own limited knowledge of DCS / Safety system setups. There’s someone out there who can correct me.

My version of security? You have to reach 10,000 points in a Tetris game before you get access to the guts of the machine.

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Saturday Star 2008-09-13 – Job Opportunities

September 15, 2008

Another week, another scan of the Saturday Star newspaper. Here’s a list of job ads in the paper:

  • I see Murphy Oil is looking for a senior production surveillance installation engineer, and senior installation support engineer. CVs to be submitted here. Someone once told me, if you every quit Murphy, you can never come back again. Some one told me the same thing about ExxonMobil as well, I can tell you for a fact that they aren’t making good that promise.
  • QP is looking for a lot of people (full page ad). You can visit the QP website. Did I tell you that QP’s SWB (salary, wages, benefits) package is something to be sneezed at?
  • Petrofac is looking for people. Unlike the last advert, these are for KL positions. Need 10+ years relevant exp. Apply here with full details.
  • Here’s a strange one. “Offshore/onshore safety trainers required. We are the “Trainer of Choice” … Please fax your resume to … Sharina at 03-2693 6915 …” Someone please contact this person and tell me what drops out.
  • Lloyd’s Register Technical Services is looking for an Inspection Engineer. Apply here with full details.
  • Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (Sabic) is looking for a process and a production engineer. You can apply via email here. 

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HAZID – How do you run a Review?

September 12, 2008

I’ve facilitated HAZOP (Hazard and Operability) reviews before, but never a HAZID (Hazard Identification) review. In fact, I’ve never attended one as well. Anyone know how the process goes?

For HAZOPs, here’s an outline of the review steps:

  • Break up the process (note that it is process based) up into nodes, allowing an easier analysis of the process. Implicit is that the system is assumed to be reductionist, i.e. the sum is made of the parts.
  • How big should a section be, you ask? Well, each process equipment is a good start. Make sure you define the boundaries properly, such that all process deviations are logically covered. For example, you might want to lump the isolation and control valves of a vessel into the vessel node, rather that with upstream or downstream equipment. If you were really pedantic, you might want nodes as small as a single line…

(to be continued)

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