Engineering and management services company Penspen will be revisiting work it carried out more than 20 years ago after winning an engineering study for the development of a field in the Niger Delta offshore Southern Nigeria.

The project will include an evaluation of the OML-122 field development, subsea gas pipeline and onshore central processing facility and the overall investment required for the project.

The study is being carried out as part of Project Dawn, a three-year development project worth $1.2 billion that includes the construction of a pipeline network to deliver natural gas to the Escravos – Lagos Pipeline System, which was designed and constructed under the supervision of Penspen more than two decades ago.

The gas from Project Dawn will feed power plants and different industrial applications in Nigeria.

The project is one of several Penspen is focussing on in West Africa as it looks to increase its international reach.

Penspen Chairman Peter O’Sullivan told SEN, “I took over two years ago and since then we’ve been focussing on developing a global strategy for Penspen. We’re very much oil and gas focussed covering engineering from wellhead to storage tank to distribution and everything in between.”

He said the history of Penspen was very much in pipelines but that this was now broadening out with the acquisition of process engineering company DPS, bringing it FPSO processing equipment expertise.

He said the Middle East is also a target area for growth for Penspen, which has had an office in Abu Dhabi for more than 40 years. The Abu Dhabi office now houses more than 350 staff members.

“We are going to use this as a base to grow from in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman as well.

“We target everything from national oil companies to international oil companies, and offshore is an area we are looking to grow in.

“We have brought some of the team from Aberdeen, where we have a lot of offshore and experience from the North Sea, to Abu Dhabi because we see this as a region where there will be demand for that.”

He said there was scope for the design of subsea pipelines and engineering FEED and detailed design for topsides projects.

New reality

O’Sullivan said he expects projects to pick up in 2016 after this year’s downturn, during which the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. cut its budget by 40%.

“Everyone I have spoken to expects the oil price to remain where it is for the next few years. This is the new reality. There is a lot of consensus around that. Our clients are planning on that basis.

“2015 has been a transition year from the old world to the new in terms of oil price. Plans were revised because the year turned out to be a lot different to expectations at the beginning.

Next year [there will be] a lot more predictability in terms of what gets awarded and when. Work that is planned will get done,” he said.

But he said he was concerned over the future of the U.K. North Sea, which has seen a huge slowdown. “I worry about the North Sea where capital has evaporated,” he said. “Costs are high, the fiscal environment has changed three times in 10 years and there have been no big discoveries. The U.K.’s lack of predictability puts people off.”