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Journal of Australian Energy Producers
RESEARCH ARTICLE (Non peer reviewed)

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

P. Goode
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- Author Affiliations

Transfield Services.

The APPEA Journal 51(2) 707-707 https://doi.org/10.1071/AJ10087
Published: 2011

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.

Managing director and chief executive officer—Transfield Services Limited; Peter has a PhD (petroleum engineering) and a BSc (mathematics and computing science).

He was appointed as a managing director and chief executive officer in April 2009. He has a track record of successful leadership in outsourced services globally and more than 30 years of experiences at international companies, including Vetco International and Schlumberger.

He has been a non-executive director of Transfield Services Infrastructure Fund since April 2009. He is a director of Expro Group Limited and was a director of Oslo Stock Exchange listed company, Ocean Rig, from July 2006 to March 2008. He is an alumni of Columbia Business School where he completed an executive management program. Member: SPE, the Advisory Board of Herriot-Watt University, Scotland.