Affiliates: from Partner to Satellite Office

August 3, 2008

Here’s a story: One major oil and gas consultant had an office in shell I say, KL and another in, say Bangalore. The office in KL was swamped with work, having to hire (expensive) consultants to supplement their workforce.

The office in Bangalore was under utilised. So, in a fit of sheer blinding obviousness, the KL office started giving a lot of work to the Indian office, and said that the two offices operated as one entity. Everyone was happy.

I don’t know about you, but I would be unhappy. The Bangalore office seems have gone from equal status to receiving handouts. Why is the local office management team not getting enough work on their own? Which higher management decided that having an oil & gas consulting office in India was a good move? Do you even need Indian office management, or could you manage remotely from KL?

This is an example where having a partner doesn’t help you in developing your own skills and people. An even worse example is when you ‘second’ your experienced people out to your affiliate, and have a 100% non-return rate. Can you say ‘Malaysian body shop’?

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Posted by Wata

IEM Drilling Seminar – the Writeup

August 2, 2008

My colleague Hui Hin has provided a summary of the half-day course. An overview of the course is provided here.

Did I say that there were no oil and gas job in last week’s Saturday Star?

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Office – Falling Light Cover & HSE

July 31, 2008

As the lighting cover falls off the ceiling, I was wondering how such an incident would be handled in the oil and gas industry:

  • Filling out a near miss incident report.
  • Reading out the incident in the morning meeting.
  • Incorporate any lessons learnt about the incident (redundancy? Better designed support bars?).
  • Tabulated in whatever incident database exists, to be inserted into the yearly HSE report.

At the office what happens is:

  • Building maintenance comes round, re-installs the light (matter of a push, and pressing the spring loaded tongues in), leaves.
  • No lessons learnt

Did I say that the same thing had happened a month ago? Different light fixture.

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IChemE 2nd regional safety seminar – Part IV

July 28, 2008

Continuing on the same topic above, a presentation was delivered by Ir Abdul Malik bin Alias, engineering manager, DPS Bristol (M) Sdn Bhd entitled ‘DPS – Process Safety for FPSO design.’

  • Agenda
    • Safety Strategies
    • Inherent Safety Concept
    • FPSO Inherent Safety Concept
  • Safety strategies (in order of decreasing reliability and robustness)
    • Inherent
    • Passive
    • Active
    • Procedural
  • Inherent Safety
    • Eliminate hazard
      • built-in safety
  • Passive safety
    • Control hazard
  • Active safety
    • Control hazard
  • Procedural safety
    • Control with operational actions.
  • Inherent safety (methods of implementation)
    • Eliminate of minimise
    • Substitute
    • Moderate
    • Simplify

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Posted by Wata

Need help – Sizing Slug Control Valves

July 24, 2008

Anyone know how to size slug control valves? What I can figure out is this:

  • Only applicable for multiphase flow and where you predict slugs will appear, ex. upstream of your slug catcher.
  • Steady state case, you want the valve fully open, if not you would be wasting energy throttling when it is not required. So, maybe you want to design a valve with 50 kPa pressure drop at 100% opening? I label this case N, for normal.
  • If your design has included sufficient room to handle a slug (ex. between NLL and LAHH), I suppose you wouldn’t need to include a slug control valve.
  • During the throttling phase, you assume the inlet stream is 100% liquid. What flowrate do you want to throttle to? Would it be the vessel design liquid flowrates? Or since the vessel design flowrates assume that liquid dump valve at 80% opening, do I use the maximum flow at 100%?
  • If you take the vessel design flowrate, what upstream pressure would you use? If you use the steady state pressure, doesn’t it make the required Cv for this case (call it S1, for slugging case 1) smaller than that required for N?
  • If you are using the results of a dynamic simulation, how would you interpret the results to use as your slug control valve design case? The reports I’ve seen give the slugging conditions, and I don’t know how they will change if the slug control valve throttles the slug. The upstream pressure on the valve must be higher than without it, but by how much?
  • Another sizing case is where you assume the inlet is 100% gas. However, I don’t think you do include this in the sizing case, as you would assume the flare control valve on the vessel would manage the vessel pressure.

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Posted by Wata

IEM Shoutout – Drilling Seminar

July 22, 2008

My tiny sphere of influence in the IEM, the Oil, Gas and Mining Technical Division (OGMTD), is running a drilling seminar this Saturday morning (26th July, 2008). The seminar will be held at the Crystal Crown hotel, on Jalan Utara in PJ, from 9 to 1 pm. Costs are IEM members: RM200.00, non-members: 300.00

The registration form is available here. This is a draft outline of the course.

For further details, please contact Jamaliah ( 03-7968 4012 ) or Norimah ( 03-7968 4010 ) at the Institute for seats, or contact the Secretriat at sec@iem.org.my.

Come one, come all, so I can get some brownie points!

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Saturday Star 08-07-19 – Job Opportunities

July 21, 2008

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

  • Trident Consultants (a competitor of mine) is looking for a project engineering manager, process engineer, principal consultants, lead consultants, project consultants and fresh meat. Email and web presence available.

Happy hunting. Let me have some feedback if you find this list useful. Even better, spread the news. PayPal donations welcome.

1 Comment | engineering, Malaysia, oil and gas | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Wata

Token of Appreciation

July 20, 2008
Safety Culture Reminder

Safety Culture Reminder

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IChemE 2nd regional safety seminar – Part I

July 19, 2008

I attended the above seminar on Monday, 14th July 2007. Interesting crowd, for once I felt that I was among my brethren of ChemEng.

I took some notes on the first presentation ‘PETRONAS – Enhancing chemical process safety in PETRONAS towards superior performance’ delivered by Kumar Karunakaran of Group Technical Services.

  • Introduction to PETRONAS
  • Introduction to Process Safety
  • Process Safety Enhancements in PETRONAS
  • Implementation approach
  • Implementation of new Roles and Responsibilities
    • Champions
    • Focal Person
    • Process Safety Aspect Custodian
  • The role of Situational Assessments (SA).
  • Problem areas discovered during SAs.
    • Control of Safety Interlocks & Protective System Bypasses.
    • Inconsistent Lock Out Tag Out (LOTO) application when used on non-electrical equipment.
    • Insufficient Pressure Relief Devices (PRD) performance evaluation.
  • Ensuring sustainability through monitoring and measurement
    • Establish Process Safety Community of Practice (CoP)
  • Key success factors.
  • Way forward.
Blue Spotted Stingray

Blue Spotted Stingray

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Posted by Wata

Gas Prices – The Continuing Saga

July 18, 2008

News on the gas prices. Extracting from The Star:

From July 1, industries using more than two million cu ft of gas a day will enjoy a 70% discount on the market price of gas, now at RM79 per million British thermal unit (mmmbtu).

Under this new structure, industries using more than two million cu ft of gas a day will enjoy the new price of RM23.88 per mmmbtu, down from RM32.56 per mmmbtu, which was to have been effective this month.

Those using less than two million cu ft a day, including 8,887 households that have gas piped directly to their homes, will enjoy a price of RM22.06 per mmmbtu beginning Aug.

 I wonder if the Independent Power Producers (IPPs) had anything to do with this?

Barracuda Shoal

Barracuda Shoal

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