The past 15 years were spent in the Oil and Gas industry. Over 7 years for Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij BV. (‘NAM’, the Dutch Shell OU) and at the moment over 7 years for ENGIE E&P Nederland BV. Not in the core business of these E&P companies but as part of their IT department or as the business rep. in a project manager role. Although I was geared to move into the E&P core business coming from university (I hold a masters in Mechanical Engineering, Energy- & Process technology and a family background as a son of a Shell expatriate), this was not to be. I clearly do not have the required competencies to be employed by companies like these.
During the years at Shell I was responsible for the offshore IT infrastructure and all the services provided over that infrastructure. Anything connected to an RJ45, RJ11, fiber, microwave or VSAT on any of the 40 odd offshore platforms was my responsibility. Whether a phone cell on a flotel with 150 people on board, a rig on campaign or any of the manned and unmanned fixed jacket platforms requiring data transfer for ESD/ASD systems, videoconferencing, wireline data, AIS, satnav, DCS, Fire&Gas systems etc. etc. I took care of it. Air and sea logistics, planning, engineering, design, resourcing, budgetting and workpacks. Liaising with all internal and external parties/departments/vendors to ensure timely and succesful delivery. During the last year of my assignment to Shell ENGIE E&P Nederland BV. acquired various assets from NAM. In that acquisition I was the project manager ensuring physical (DCS) control of the assets was handed over to ENGIE over the existing (Shell) infrasctructure from their sites.

After having spent well over 7 years with Shell, it was time to move on and I joined ENGIE E&P (then GDF SUEZ E&P Nederland BV.). They had recently purchased various assets from NAM (a.o. the NOGAT pipeline) but agreed to take over some business functions at a later stage. Specifically the services provided for the NOGAT pipeline were left with NAM to provide ENGIE E&P time to prepare for taking these business functions over. That time arrived and ENGIE E&P and I came to an agreement I was to be the project manager to take care of the handover of the NOGAT Hydrocarbon Accounting and -Dispatching business functions and the required systems and also run multiple major and minor projects to extend the existing ENGIE E&P Hydrocarbon Accounting system. That is when I moved from NAM to ENGIE E&P. The system used for dispatching and hydrocarbon accounting i Energy Components by Tietoenator (‘Tieto’). Taking these business functions and systems over required liaising with all offshore operators, building the infrastructure required to exchange data (a.o. PI, VPN’s, BizTalk, EDIGAS Messaging, Energy Components etc. etc.), recruiting personnel, training personnel etc. etc. and at a given moment activate a seemless change over of pipeline dispatching from control by NAM to control by ENGIE E&P. Considering I am still with ENGIE E&P, I guess that went satisfactory.

Since then we migrated to Energy Components v11.x, I built multiple sales and production allocation algorithms, spent hours, days and even months developing and testing features required by the business. I can very boldly state I know the workings of Energy Components very very well although I will not say I know everything there is to know about EC… The product is far to elaborate for anyone to claim they know the entire product. However, the tool is effectively ‘open source’ so you can find out all it’s inner workings.

For me the time to move on has come again. If someone out there is looking for a project manager with 25 years of experience in IT then look no further. Give me a call or connect to me via linkedin. Because I spent the last 7 years working on Energy Components I would prefer working with that tool or similar again, preferably in the role of project manager but specialist would be fine too. I hope to hear from you.