Polarcus
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Leadership
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olarcus is a focused provider of safe and environmentally responsible marine acquisition services, geophysical solutions, and seismic data management. Founded in 2008 with sustainability at the heart of the business, the organisation has grown to be recognised as the industry standard for environmental and operational excellence. Chief Operating Officer Lars Oestergaard describes how a joint vision is driving the Polarcus success story. With a strong operational and commercial background within Maersk Drilling you joined Polarcus as Chief Operating Officer in June 2018? How did this role differ from your prior experiences and what did you inherit upon commencing the position? I came to Polarcus after spending more than 12 years in Maersk in various roles within HR, Operations, EHSQ and Commercial. Most of the time was spend in Maersk Drilling in operational and commercial leadership roles working in Denmark, Korea and US. My last role with
Maersk Drilling was as Chief Commercial Officer and part of Executive Management. In this way the main difference, when moving into the COO role, was the broader functional responsibility and the change in technology from drilling technology to seismic technology. The COO function cannot be categorised easily, what are your primary areas of responsibility within Polarcus? Working out of our HQ in Dubai I have the Executive leadership and management responsibility of: Sales and Marketing incl. regional offices in Singapore, London and Houston, Operations, EHSQ, Geophysical services and innovation. As part of the Executive team I work closely with the four other executives and obviously report to the CEO. Being a listed company there is a lot of duties to perform for the executive team and thanks to a strong team I can focus most of my time on the performance of the business. Your primary market has been through a
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Lars Oestergaard 3
Leadership challenging few years, but as a business over recent times you have certainly held your ground under challenging circumstances. What would you suggest are the main reasons you have been able to thrive? Firstly, we are a focused geophysical service provider and what we do, we do really well. It is imbedded in Polarcus to focus on our core values of responsibility, innovation and excellence and the feedback we receive from clients is that we are very service oriented, provide predictable high quality acquisition services, have a strong safety culture and are good at coming up with new innovations without making it too complicated. Innovation, including technological innovation, is an important part of driving the oil and gas service sector forward, but looking at the sector broadly new technology has sometimes come at too high cost and been too complicated and unable to deliver the promised value for money. We have had a different approach which we have proven works with among other our XArray™ technology, allowing more seismic data to be acquired by adding additional sources instead more streamers. I believe that by focusing on innovation, quality and value for money, customers will continue to look our way for projects. Secondly, we have been disciplined on cost and disciplined on pricing and this has been key to driving the business result we delivered, in particular in 2019, and we must continue this commercial discipline going forward.
Without doubt you are seen and have performed as the industry leader but a key differentiator for your business is the attitude towards the environment. To be held as the greenest seismic related business globally is a superb accolade. Can you offer an insight into how the business embeds the environment in every decision? Looking after the environment is part of Polarcus DNA and reflected in our Polarcus Vision, Core Values, Commitments and 2023 Strategy. One of the outcomes of this is that managing emissions to air has been high
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on the priority list since the formation of the company in 2008. An example of this is that Polarcus has been committed to low sulfur emissions for more than a decade by among other things using Marine Gas Oil. The average sulfur content of fuel consumed from the very first Polarcus project in 2009 until the end of 2019 is 0.11% mass by mass. This is significantly below the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) sulfur cap of 3.5% which was in effect to January 2020 and even significantly below the new cap of 0.5% in effect from January 2020. This mean that Polarcus and those who have
worked with Polarcus over the last 10 years has taken part in industry-leading low emissions marine seismic acquisition. Another example of our Polarcus Explore Green™ agenda is again Polarcus XArray™ marine seismic acquisition method technology developed in 2015. This acquisition method optimizes the collection of more high-quality data per sail line while reducing the in-sea drag of the seismic acquisition unit and has been a key driver for the continued reduction of fuel consumption and Polarcus gaseous emissions per square kilometre of seismic data acquired.
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Leadership Having come to Polarcus from the outside, the Explore GreenTM agenda and mindset embedded in the Polarcus organisation is one of the things I have been most impressed with and proud of. It really means something to everyone in Polarcus and when we run campaigns focusing on numerous environmental topics, such as cleaning the oceans from floating debris, the engagement from our offshore crews and teams is amazing and can only make you feel humble and proud. As a company Polarcus has a high retention of employees and I think it is because people identify with what it means to be Polarcus and how we go about our daily work.
VESSEL AGENCY
HELICOPTER SERVICES
AG ENCIES @ DHSS . N L
WARE HOUSING
As a business that collects and collates seismic data it is no surprise that you have embraced data collection to enhance your own working practices and create streamlined processes which result in data being available quicker and in a digestible format. Would you say the business is quite advanced in a digital sense? Where do you see opportunities to take this further? In Polarcus we quickly saw how digitalisation can be used to deliver better data faster and thereby shorten our client’s exploration cycle by enabling them to make better decisions earlier. Therefore, we have developed Polarcus CirrusTM by which we provide clients with near real-time access to high-fidelity seismic data using streaming and cloud technology together with tailored software solutions. We simply stream data off the vessel and provide high-end fast track products by processing the data in the cloud. We have done this on several commercial projects in 2019 and 2020 and the results have been very good. We will take this further with integrated acquisition management where live access to survey data enables optimal decision making while acquiring the data offshore and thereby enable our clients to be directly involved in decisions and get a more fit for purpose data product. As we have taken these steps, we have also learned that artificial intelligence and machine learning also has something to offer our business and clients. Therefore there will be more digitalisation projects in the future to continue this evolution.
The Business Profile A challenge for any industry leader is maintaining growth, you work very closely with your clients many of whom you represent across the globe. How important is it that you become a strategic partner and look to embrace the customers needs and implement services or systems that can go above and beyond their expectations? We are here to make our clients successful and deliver solutions that fit their need and therefore embracing our customer needs is very important. We do this by staying very close to them and understanding what their challenges and ambitions are and then design the solutions that fit. We are strategically located in Dubai, Singapore, London, and Houston, with very competent colleagues with expertise in marine seismic acquisition and geophysics. In 2019, for instance, we helped a client in the Middle East get a lot more value for money and overcome some challenging environmental conditions by combining towed streamer and ocean bottom node acquisition technologies. This resulted in better data faster through streamer and cloud technology and good use of nodes where platforms and shallow water provided a need for this. This way the clients was able to make decisions faster and explore more. In general, both in the preparation, execution and follow up phase we stay very close to clients and have a very open dialogue about the best way forward and this is something I as the COO have received a lot of positive feedback from clients on. They see our people as very transparent, open minded and good
at coming up with optimised ways to approach survey design and acquisition. We obviously also discuss with our clients where we can do better to drive our continuous improvement and customer satisfaction. On the flip side of the customers importance is that of your key suppliers. Given the global nature of your operations and the high standards you set how important have key supplier relations become? Management of suppliers is critical in marine seismic as any marine acquisition project is relying on several companies working together under our project management to execute the project safely and efficiently. Therefore, engagement of suppliers and maintaining a close dialogue about all aspects of the operations is very critical. Every time we commence a project, we have extensive kick off meetings with our client and involve suppliers to make sure all are well informed. In particular we drive a strong safety culture on all projects from day one. Safety is our number one priority and it is important our suppliers are aligned with how safety should be managed when working with us and understand that no one getting hurt is the most important priority to us. As a company we always try to improve and one of the things we would like to improve further in 2020 is our engagement with our key suppliers - not just at a project level, but also at the corporate and senior leadership level. Being aligned and continuously improving is the key and benefits both us, and our suppliers. 7
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