Atkins and Houston Offshore Engineering (HOE) attended the 2015 Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) in Houston, Texas – one of the biggest events in the oil and gas calendar – showcasing the companies’ full multidisciplinary expertise, providing a unique lifecycle offering to the oil and gas market, as well as offshore marine renewables engineering and design capabilities.
Ivy Jones, communication and marketing specialist at HOE, said: “Everything came together for a successful show. It was great to have so many Atkins and HOE staff working together as one team to represent our co-branded booth. So many individuals were on-site each day and were able to offer their unique story or expertise of a certain capability or project.”
HOE has been exhibiting at OTC every year since 2005, but 2015 was its first year as part of Atkins. With more than 94,000 attendees from 130 countries, OTC 2015 provided an opportunity to network with clients and demonstrate the joint capability that Atkins and HOE provide to the international oil and gas industry.
Ivy said: “The visitor numbers show us that no matter the state of the industry, OTC is a mainstay. The messages we convey and the tone of the conference may be different from year to year depending on the market, but the show continues to grow each year. OTC is a rare opportunity for companies with common industry knowledge to come together from all over the world, share ideas, learn, and build relationships.”
The HOE team took part in the “Applying Continuous Improvement for Design, Fabrication, and Installation” session on the Williams Gulfstar 1 project. This session examined the ground breaking development – it was the first classic Spar chosen for development since the Hoover/Diana Spar in 2000 – and included a ‘lessons learned’ section in which the authors conveyed the challenges of the project. It also provided a forum for discussion around how each challenge was addressed by the engineering team and how those lessons could be applied to future deepwater oil and gas projects.
Presented during this session, authors from Williams and HOE won the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Best Paper of 2015 award for their work on technical paper, “Gulfstar – VIM and Mooring Chain Fatigue,” recognised above hundreds of other papers presented at OTC. The same paper also won “First Runner Up” from the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (SNAME) in the Best Paper of the Year category.