Ensuring Australia’s competitiveness in the global oil and gas market*

Abstract

There is an estimated $200 billion worth of capital expenditure presently planned for Australian gas projects. These projects provide the potential for $20 billion worth of engineering and maintenance opportunities for Australian companies and an estimated 16,000 ongoing positions in the sector. The scale of these projects has drawn international attention and is increasingly drawing global competition.

Australian companies are at risk of the misperception that they don’t have the international know-how or the people to compete for these large-scale projects. We need to ensure that our Australian ingenuity and scale continue to position us as the service provider of choice for construction, project management and maintenance opportunities. Working together with industry, we have shown that we have what it takes to compete on a global scale. We also need to work with government and unions to ensure we have scalable highly-skilled people available to support these projects.

This presentation will consider the following case study: Transfield Services delivers services to companies including Woodside Energy, which operates the A$27 billion North West Shelf project, one of the world’s largest LNG production facilities with an output of 16.4 million tonnes of LNG a year. While expansion continues, ongoing brownfield project and maintenance services demand the ongoing support of a highly-skilled workforce of up to 1,000 people.

This case study explores:

1. innovative service solutions in a resource-scarce environment through access to global resources innovative scheduling of work; and,

2. the challenges of sourcing and retaining highly-skilled people by improving the opportunities for global and domestic employee mobility and investing in training and developing local people.