Petrofac
Omolara Yaroson (Chemical Engineering)
2nd to 22nd August 2010
Petrofac is an international provider of facilities solutions to the oil & gas
industry. This involves designing, building, operating and co-investing in
oil and gas production and processing industries. Petrofac was
originally founded in 1981 in Texas, USA, but has now expanded in size and currently employs
12,500 people in 25 countries.
The Petrofac team in Surrey, where I was based, deals mainly in upstream oil and gas processes.
These are basically all the processes that lead to the production of oil and gas from a well, and
comprise several stages. The well needs to be drilled and the oil and gas mixture needs to be
extracted from it and brought to the earth surface. After this, the mixture undergoes initial processing
for example to remove impurities such as Sulphur and nitrates, before it is distributed for further
processing in a downstream plant or used directly for energy.
I spent my time working in the process engineering team. This is the team that deals with flow after it
has been extracted from an oil well and brought to the surface for processing. At my time of working
there, the process team was involved in the front end engineering design FEED for a major oil
producing client. This involved designing equipment and plant layout for the units of the plant in order
to process the stream. This usually includes, but is not limited to, design of slug catchers, utilities
units, H2S extraction units and dehydration units.
Other than the Process engineering team, other areas that chemical engineers work in Petrofac
include pipelines, flow assurance, health and safety among others. Their work is very
multidisciplinary, so the process engineers work with Mechanical, Electrical and Civil Engineers, as
well as project managers.
During my time there, I worked through process flow diagrams, and learnt to appreciate the amount of
detail that goes into the construction of a chemical plant. I sat with some of the engineers and learned
about their work and their career experiences. I also performed some tasks for the project at hand,
including line-numbering and equipment mark-up. I learned the IT package that the flow assurance
team used, and got to grips with some of the main issues that flow engineers encounter. I was also
fortunate enough to sit in on a client meeting and see the dynamics of client relationships and how
decisions are made.
Unfortunately, my time at Petrofac was during one of their busiest periods, and with limited mancapacity, they were unable to dedicate much time to me. However, I did gain from the experience of
working within a contracting company and might see a future for myself within the contracting
industry.
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