Specialist services by East Coast Promotions

COMPANY PROFILE

2015

SPECIALIST SERVICES

www.specserve.com | + 971 4 4579500

Providing a safe environment solution Editorial: Harriet Pattison

With product and geographic expansion on the horizon, the future is looking to be a very promising one for Specialist Services, the modular building experts within the oil and gas industry. Total World Energy speaks to Chief Executive Officer, Ian Rogers, who attributes much of the company’s long-lasting success to the hard work and dedication of its people… Founded over three decades ago in Abu Dhabi by entrepreneur and British civil engineer, Philip Bond, Specialist Services has secured an enviable industry position and 32 years on, it continues to be held in high esteem by large industry leaders in the oil & gas sector. Initially engineering small

acquisition came with a yard in Al Quoz, Dubai, which the company still owns and operates from today and the start of Specialist Services’ modular building fleet. With an extensive range of capabilities split into five business units: modular buildings, EPC, drilling, testing and production, modular hire

projects and plans to increase its already impressive footprint. “More and more over the last five years we’ve focused on the oil and gas industry because that’s driven by high specifications and high quality requirements, mainly offshore. So pretty much everything we do goes into that industry and we’re

buildings and offshore structures for the oil industry, 15 years later Bond then bought into a business in Dubai, at the time called Arabvan, which led Specialist Services into the modular building business. This

and service, maintenance and spare parts, Specialist Services maintain a prominent position in the oil and gas industry. Total World Energy speaks to Chief Executive Officer, Ian Rogers, about the company’s current

providing equipment offshore that will either house people safely, so accommodation cabins, workshops and offices. Or we’re packaging equipment so that it’s safe, so we make a lot of testing equipment, particularly

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SPECIALIST SERVICES separators, surge tanks and complete well test packages that can be used onshore or offshore but generally everything we do will be used in a hazardous area of some description,” Rogers explains. “More recently, we’ve got into larger projects where we’re building on an EPC basis, so larger technical rooms, accommodation packages and modules down in our yard in Mussafah in Abu Dhabi. “The other element of our business, is a rental business where we can hire zone-rated cabins, laboratories, workshops, offices and accommodation to our clients, so those are the key things that we do.” One of Specialist Services’ key business ventures is its modular building series. “The key is intellectual property”, Rogers

explains. “We launched the G4 Global Series which takes four very stringent global standards creating a building that complies with them all. That’s important because if you’re an operator in a global oil and gas industry, you can use that building in offshore Australia, you can use it in Asia, the North Sea and off the Gulf of Mexico, so it enables our clients to move their assets around the globe without having to purchase equipment specifically for a local market. “We’ve sold a number to one of our clients and we’ve got a contract to build a significant number more for another client, so our global customers are seeing the benefit of transferability of equipment. So for them, it means they can use the assets anywhere, increasing their own utilisation and therefore

reducing their capital spend,” Rogers adds.

VENTURING FURTHER AFIELD To remain at the top of its game, Rogers explains that Specialist Services is looking to expand its geographic footprint. Currently operating out of four global hotspots (Aberdeen, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Singapore), with a solid footprint from Europe through the Middle East to South East Asia, he explains there is further potential and opportunity available in Africa and North America: “We have products that we can take to those markets where we’re not really well penetrated but the other side of it we see adjacent products. For example, we produce what we call an early production facility which is an adjacent product to

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our drilling and testing business so it uses the same capabilities and skills from an engineering point of view, it’s the same potential clients, so it’s a product they can use in their industry which is similar to things we’ve done in the past. “So we’re sticking to our core values, everything we do is high value added engineering, but we’re stretching the type of products that we’re able to produce and we’re bringing in more and more engineers capable of developing such products. “So it’s product expansion, close to what we currently do and its geographic expansion, that’s where we’re heading. We’re looking for a footprint

facility in Singapore and we see opportunities in that area too. So we’ll definitely be putting in more offices and focusing on our hire and service, we’ll still be building products here in the UAE but we’ll ship to those locations,” adds Rogers. Operating in an increasingly competitive industry, Rogers explains that despite the inevitable competition present within the industry and in the five business units it specialises in, Specialist Services ensures it maintains and provides “a high quality, highly specified product at the best possible price at the shortest possible lead-time. We think those three things; quality, price and lead-time are what

effectively at a time and cost that competes with the North American fabricators, so we’ve got a good story to tell around those contacts.”

in the southern part of the United States, so we need to be somewhere like Houston or Lafayette. We’re also looking for a similar footprint in South East Asia. We’ve got an office and

gives us competitive advantage. “We’ve won a contract for a very large operator in North America, so we’re finding that we can land product into the North American market cost

sustainable for 25 years. The UZ750 project includes the construction of four production artificial islands which will involve a central complex to house the processing facilities and the

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THE UPPER ZAKUM 750 PROJECT Upper Zakum, located in the Arabian Gulf in Abu Dhabi, stands as the second largest offshore oilfield and fourth largest oilfield in the world, currently producing 500,000 barrels of oil a day (bpd). This production capacity is set to increase to an exponential 750,000 bpd following the completion of the UZ750 Project. At an estimated cost of US$10 billion, the project is set to be completed in 2017 and will be

SPECIALIST SERVICES north, south and west satellite platforms. Receiving a Letter of Award in December 2013, Specialist Services has been involved in the Upper Zakum 750 project for just over a year to design, engineer, fabricate and supply eight LER (Local Equipment Rooms) and four LCR (Local Control Rooms) for the project. With a time frame of two and half years, Rogers expects the last of the buildings to be delivered in the last quarter of 2016. “W ith over 8000 tons, these buildings will be completely designed, engineered, built and commissioned in our yard in Abu Dhabi, put onto a barge and shipped offshore. The Upper Zakum project involves building four offshore

“It’s all about people and if you’ve got good people then you can do almost anything and I think we have here”

islands, so rather than putting everything on jackets in the sea, they’re building these islands. Interestingly, they’re building the infrastructure to an offshore specification. The sort of thing you’d normally expect to sit on top of a jacket but it’s actually going to sit on an island. So we’ve been hard at that for over a year and we’re on schedule. We’ve got a number of these buildings taking shape in our Mussafah yard and it’s looking good. “Each building takes about a year, there’s a lot of engineering and we’re doing a number of things in parallel. The client requires a staggered delivery so the first buildings are going out August this year and the last ones go out at the back end of

Specialists in Combined Pressurisation, Fire & Gas Control Systems (CPFG), Supply, Manufacture & Installation of ATEX and IECEx Control Systems

PDC Systems Limited

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Specialist Services has recently completed a contract for Sea Trucks Group to provide a 48 module accommodation extension, each with fourman accommodation, to go onto one of their DP3 offshore construction vessels deployed for accommodation support on the Arkutun-Dagi Project in Sakhalin,

Russia for the weather window and work up there in the summer. “So the reason Sea Trucks chose us was for one, we guaranteed delivery in 18 weeks for a very large project which was critical and two, we gave them a modular design so that once that job was finished they could take it apart and use half of the modules on the same jack up and half on another; so that was quite interesting. Almost all of what we do is in some modular form or other, so clients have the flexibility of deploying equipment on a current job or for future jobs,” Rogers explains.

Russia. “We built the modules here in Dubai and shipped them off to Singapore. They were installed on a rig in Singapore under a very, very tight window because that rig then had to go up to Sakhalin in

The EPC aspect of the business is also critical to Specialist Services and one of the most interesting projects the company has been involved with in recent years is Shell’s Prelude FLNG Project. “We

Ian Rogers

next year, because that’s when the client will be ready to accept them, that’s their schedule and that’s when they want them,” Rogers explains.

NOTEWORTHY PROJECTS

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built a turret house which was effectively a very, very robust control room that went on to the Prelude floating gas production platform, built for Shell. So it went onto that platform at dry docks here in Dubai and then off to Korea for finishing, to then end up on the North West shelf of Australia. We’ve effectively done the control room for the biggest gas producing vessel on the planet. The Prelude is the first of a number that Shell expect to build. Our turret house sat right underneath the gas flare, the turret is where the gas is flared off at one end of the ship, so that’s the most hazardous place you can be on a vessel, so our job was to design and build something which would protect the people working inside of that,” explains Rogers. “So that’s the sort of thing we do, small pieces of large jobs which are absolutely critical.”

THE PERSONAL TOUCH Prior to joining Specialist Services, Rogers worked at British company, Aggreko for ten years, spending half his time in Dubai running their Middle East operations and international sales and marketing business out of Jebel Ali, with the other half spent as Managing Director for Asia, based in Singapore. Having spent a total of 22 years working overseas, he then joined Specialist Services as Chief Executive Officer five years ago this month. As with so many successful companies, the employees at Specialist Services’ remain at the centre of the business and for good reason. “Effectively we’ve got about 950 of our own workers on our shop floors in any

SPECIALIST SERVICES one day, and we have very robust training programs for those guys because we want to develop our own people, whether it’s in the class of welding or whether it’s other core competencies within their discipline,” explains Rogers. “So we’ve got a lot of long serving employees that have trained with us. In our staff category, we have about 400 and they range from engineers to draughtsmen, discipline engineers to salesmen and HR so all the typical functions you’d expect. Each have a personal development plan, we take their own development very seriously so those are reviewed on a twice yearly basis. From a training point of view, overall we’ve got about 1,400 people in the group and we try hard to develop in house, we have our own trainer and

“A high quality, highly specified product at the best possible price at the shortest possible leadtime. We think those three things; quality, price and lead-time are what gives us competitive advantage”

training set up in house,” Rogers explains. For a company that started as a result of the entrepreneurial spirit of Philip Bond, who, now Chairman and 25% shareholder, is still involved in the business he founded over three decades ago. W ith a bright future ahead and significant growth on the cards, Rogers explains that much of the company’s exponential success is down to its people: “We’ve got a lot of good people that do great jobs for very demanding customers. It’s all about people and if you’ve got the right people then you can do almost anything and I think we have here. At the core of what we do is some great people who are smart enough to design and manufacture world class equipment.”

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