Making quality count
  from: Offshore Engineer
  by: David Morgan
  Tuesday, April 29, 2008

The first tangible fruits of the Heerema Fabrication Group’s acquisition of an engineering consultancy were revealed with last month’s signing of a major EPC contract with Sweden’s ABB for the design, procurement and fabrication of a 400MW transformer offshore platform for installation in German waters. The group has also been successful in securing work for more far-flung markets lately, as David Morgan reports.

The transformer platform will form part of what is being hailed as the world’s largest offshore wind farm development, to be located about 130km offshore in the German sector of the North Sea.

‘This unique project is perfectly in line with our strategy to leverage our EPCI project management capabilities in the offshore oil & gas industry to other markets,’ comments Jan-Pieter Klaver, HFG’s chief executive officer. ‘Our reputation and expertise in the execution of offshore EPCI projects in the harsh North Sea environment have contributed to the award of the project by ABB.’

Heerema Vlissingen started fabricating the 1500t jacket and 2500t topsides for the transformer platform last month (March), working for the first time in an integrated project team with the platform’s designer, HFG Engineering US in Houston. That engineering arm – the former Albert-Garaudy Associates (AGA) consulting firm now working under a new nameplate and cross-pollinated with HFG personnel – is today seen as a key component of the group’s continuing quest for international expansion and diversification.

HFG had been looking around the market for an engineering partner for some time before AGA, with offices in both Houston and New Orleans, caught its eye. The acquisition was completed at the end of 2006 and AGA was renamed in April the following year. The process of integration has since gone smoothly, reports Klaver, helped by ‘an intrinsic will of the people to work together, to move forward and do projects together’.

According to Klaver, the group was looking principally for two things in an engineering company acquisition: that it should be keen to work with a fabricator and should have some West African experience. ‘In AGA we found a company that met both criteria, so the fit was correct,’ he says. ‘To us the enthusiasm of the people is more important than the absolute skills they bring with them. The technical skills are in the company. Where we at HFG can add strength is in the project management side. Basically they are very complementary to us, and the combination will make us a very strong force in the future.

‘Through the integration process we are focusing more and more on international projects from an EPCI standpoint,’ explains Klaver. ‘Where we believe we can make a difference in the industry is in managing such projects from a fabrication-driven point of view, so that the schedule basically is driving the engineering phase and constructability of the design, enabling you to follow an efficient programme in the yards that allows you to secure schedule and budget requirements.’

With the German wind energy contract under its belt, the HFG team is now hungry for collaborative success on the oil & gas side too. They are currently bidding on a number of offshore projects in Nigeria, Angola, Denmark and the UK, most of them on an EPC basis.

Although it ceased operations at the Norwegian Tønsberg yard some time back, the group can still bring any combination of three fabrication facilities into play: two in the Netherlands, at Zwijndrecht and Vlissingen, and one in the UK, in Hartlepool. While local preferences will still be met as required, the accent now is on offering services as a group rather than as individual yards.

‘We have a fairly good workload for the years ahead,’ reports Klaver. ‘Zwijndrecht is up to capacity for 2008 and 2009, with the main deck for BP Norway’s Valhall redevelopment starting to take shape in the hall following fabrication engineering – at 11,000t this will be quite a deck! Hartlepool is a little quiet at the moment having delivered the 2000t Sean compression module for Shell UK last year, but we see plenty of opportunities coming up there. And Vlissingen now has the transformer platform to come in alongside BG Tunisia’s Hasdrubal A platform.’ The structures for Hasdrubal – a 1000t jacket and 1500t topsides – are due for sailaway to the Gulf of Gabes location in the Mediterranean this summer (OE December 2007).

‘We are confident that we have a good portfolio of projects in hand for the coming years, and the integration process with HFG Engineering provides opportunities for being in projects outside the North Sea as well and that is exactly what we envisaged,’ he adds. ‘We should follow our own strengths and, based on that, look to markets that we have not approached so far. They are within reach for us now with the skills we can bring to the table.’

Even before the AGA acquisition HFG was casting its nets wider, reasoning that although the North Sea continued to provide good business for the yards keeping all its eggs in the one basket might be unwise. ‘As a company well established in the oil & gas industry with experience of executing and managing EPCI projects efficiently, we saw opportunities to export the knowledge we have in our company to other markets as well,’ explains Klaver, who knows a thing or two about the offshore business and in particular how to get the best out of a fabrication yard. Since graduating in civil engineering from Delft University18 years ago, he has served the Heerema organisation in various guises, including spells with Heerema Marine Contractors and Dockwise and lengthier stints managing the Tønsberg and Vlissingen facilities, before moving into a corporate management role with HFG at the Zwijndrecht headquarters.

‘West Africa is a real focus for us now,’ says Klaver. HFG has set up a 100% owned subsidiary in Nigeria but with that country’s political constraints and uncertainties, not to mention the recent shortage of project awards, he admits the company has yet to make any significant impact. ‘We are developing strategies to provide more local content in line with Nigeria’s requirements, which would involve some project execution over there rather than bringing it all back to Europe. It’s a very slow process, but we are making progress step by step.’

Nonetheless, there have already been a number of valuable spin-offs from the group’s heightened international business awareness. As well as the current Hasdrubal project for BG Tunisia, HFG has worked on ExxonMobil’s Kizomba A tension leg platform for Angola and participated in Shell’s Bonga FPSO project for Nigeria. And late last year, for another Angolan field development, Vlissingen completed a job that for Klaver and the yard’s managing director Wim Matthijssen epitomises the high degree of fabrication skill and project management expertise accumulated by HFG in a demanding North Sea home patch through the years.

This job was done for Daewoo, main contractor on Chevron subsidiary Cabinda Gulf Oil’s Tombua-Landana platform, and required the delivery of a 3000t template and 12 record-setting 625ft long piles with stringent dimensional requirements (OE January). ‘It was a challenging job for us from a quality standpoint but we managed to do it very well,’ says Klaver. ‘The Tombua-Landana foundation is a high quality product, involving very thick steel plates of over 100mm with dimensional control requirements of less than 3mm for lengths of 40m or 50m. The template was built with a tolerance of only 3mm between the pile cylinders, which required tremendous accuracy during construction.’

Matthijssen adds: ‘Daewoo and Chevron already informed us that they are impressed by how incredibly accurate our work is. Also noteworthy is that we completed the project without a single lost time injury.’

‘Here in the North Sea we have learned to deal with severe specifications, and severe circumstances too, so we have always been very quality conscious,’ Klaver observes, pointing out that the group has, in conjunction with DNV, developed its own far-reaching ‘Cheqsert’ audit protocol which goes beyond the normal ISO standards in driving QSHE performance and continual improvement across the organisation. ‘Under Cheqsert we review the company’s standards every year and it is working very well,’ he says. ‘We are in a highly competitive environment of course, up against lower cost countries in Asia and, increasingly these days, the Persian Gulf,’ notes Klaver. ‘But where we think we can differentiate ourselves is in delivering quality.’ OE

Transformative times

Jan-Pieter Klaver describes his group’s latest contract as ‘a challenging project in many respects; an innovative and environmentally friendly electrical power concept in a relatively new market for HFG, which will also contribute to fighting climate change’.

He is referring, among other things, to the German transformer platform’s use of ABB’s innovative HVDC Light (high-voltage direct current) power transmission technology, which made its offshore debut in 2005 bringing electricity from the Norwegian onshore grid to the giant Troll A platform to drive its gas compressors (OE April 2005).

The NordE.ON 1 transformer platform, owned by E.ON Netz Offshore of Germany, will be connected to the most remote wind farm in the world, consisting of 80 wind turbines capable of generating 400MW in total. The HVDC Light system will be used here to convert the energy generated by these offshore wind turbines and transmit it through a 130km direct current cable to shore.

The platform’s 2500t topside, measuring 55m x 35m wide, will sit on a 60m high jacket weighing 1500t. As well as designing and fabricating the structure, HFG will be responsible for procurement and offshore hookup activities.

Fabrication got under way at Vlissingen in March and is due for completion in April 2009, with installation scheduled the following month. The offshore wind farm is expected to be operational in September 2009.

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