Knight Oil Tools,
Lafayette, La., has named Phillip Thomas Mitchell general manager of its Knight Manufacturing division. He will manage Knight’s manufacturing division and focus on developing its workforce. Mitchell previously worked as an engineering manager, product line engineering manager, and a QHSSE manager with a major service provider in the UK, Houston, and Lafayette. He has a mechanical engineering degree from Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen.
Knight also has announced that Douglas W. Smith will join the firm’s corporate sales team in its Houston office. He has worked as a sales manager for other fishing and rental tools companies and has been in the oil and gas industry for more than 30 years. Smith received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Houston and is a member of the American Petroleum Institute, American Association of Drilling Engineers, and Society of Petroleum Engineers.
Knight Oil Tools is the largest privately held rental and fishing tools business in the oil and gas industry and includes Knight Fishing Services, Knight Well Services, and Knight Manufacturing.
KBC Advanced Technologies PLC,
London and Houston, has appointed Karl Bartholomew principal consultant of its Strategic Consulting Group. Formerly president and managing director of Pace Consultants Inc. (now Jacobs Consultancy Inc.), he is a widely recognized expert in the economics of technical planning, management, and valuation of refining, petrochemicals, raw materials, and natural gas operations. With 30 years of industry experience, Bartholomew has served as an expert technical witness before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in energy litigation and has provided support on behalf of others for numerous regulatory and arbitration panels, including various property tax venues in appraisal negotiations and insurance industry negotiations. Bartholomew has an MBA from Houston Baptist University and a BS in chemical engineering from the University of South Carolina. He is also a registered professional engineer in the state of Texas and certified as an accredited senior appraiser with the American Society of Appraisers. In addition, Bartholomew is a member of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, certified in business/technical valuation.
For more than 30 years, KBC consultants have provided independent advice and expertise to enable leading companies in the global energy business and other processing industries manage risk while maximizing the value from their assets.
Knowledge Reservoir and Ingrain,
both of Houston, have announced a strategic alliance designed to accelerate the use of Ingrain’s technical breakthroughs in the area of digital rock physics. Ingrain’s digital rock physics labs use advanced 3D imaging technology and patented computational methods to rapidly and accurately determine the physical properties and fluid flow characteristics of reservoir rocks. Ingrain’s digital process works equally well on core samples and drill cuttings and dramatically decreases turnaround time compared with physical core analysis. Knowledge Reservoir plans to develop enhanced reservoir modeling workflows around the wealth of data generated by Ingrain’s technology and will support clients in the application and interpretation of the data. The alliance means that Knowledge Reservoir’s consulting teams can help oil and gas companies maximize the value of their investment in Ingrain’s advanced rock properties data—such as porosity, elastic properties, and relative permeability, each computed in three directions.
Knowledge Reservoir is a leading global energy consulting firm, providing geoscience and engineering consulting and resource solutions to clients worldwide.
Ingrain was formed in 2007 to bring the petrophysical innovations of founders Dr. Amos Nur and Dr. Henrique Tono to the oil and gas industry.
AMEC PLC,
London, has acquired Aberdeen-based consultancy Performance Improvements Group Ltd. The purchase follows four other acquisitions in AMEC’s Natural Resources division over the last 18 months. AMEC has a history of working with PI, the two companies having collaborated on major gas compressor station contracts for National Grid in the UK. AMEC has growth plans for PI and expects to be actively recruiting for the new business over the next few months for expansion of its services internationally.
AMEC provides consultancy, engineering, and project management services to the world’s energy, power, and process industries. The Natural Resources division covers AMEC’s activities in oil and gas services, oil sands, and mining.
PI is a leading engineering consultancy focusing on delivering operational excellence in the North Sea. It was formed in 1997 to provide multi-discipline engineering expertise to the international oil and gas industry to help maximize uptime, efficiency, and performance of existing installations.
Subsea 7,
Aberdeen, and Technip, Paris, have agreed to dissolve their joint venture, Technip Subsea 7 Asia Pacific (TS7), once all its existing projects and tendered work have been completed. With the expected continued growth of the deepwater subsea construction market in the region, the parties now wish to pursue separate strategic development opportunities, but this does not exclude working together on a case-by-case basis on future projects. Technip and Subsea 7 worked together on significant projects in the Asia Pacific region for several years. In September 2005, Subsea 7 and Technip signed a memorandum of understanding to form a JV for the provision of subsea offshore activities in the Asia Pacific region (excluding India and Middle-East). In May 2006 the parties signed the final agreement to form the JV, which began operations on July 1, 2006.
Subsea 7 is one of the world’s leading subsea engineering and construction companies, offering all the expertise and assets that make SURF (subsea umbilical, riser, and flowline) field development possible. Subsea 7 has a fleet of dynamically positioned ships capable of reeled and flexible pipelay, subsea construction, and saturation diving, and a portfolio of pipeline construction yards worldwide.
Technip is a world leader in project management, engineering, and construction for the oil and gas industry. It has integrated capabilities and proven expertise in underwater infrastructures, offshore facilities, and large processing units and plants on land. Technip operates its own fleet of specialized vessels for pipeline installation and subsea construction.
SIXNET,
Clifton Park, NY, has named Hilton Nicholson president and CEO. He succeeds former CEO Steve Schoenberg, who will continue to serve on the company’s board of directors. Nicholson has more than 25 years of management experience with networking and telecommunications equipment manufacturers. He was most recently president of ADC’s network solutions business unit. Prior to joining ADC, he was senior vice-president of product operations at 3Com and vice-president and general manager of Lucent Technologies’ core switching and routing division. Nicholson has also held a variety of technical, marketing, strategic planning, and new business development positions at AT&T. He holds a BSEE from Louisiana Tech University, an MSEE from Clemson University, and an MBA from Duke University.
Founded in 1976, SIXNET is a privately held leader in innovative, open, industrial data products.
IDS,
Kuala Lumpur, has completed the rollout of its DataNet2 web-based oil and gas reporting system among three major clients in Malaysia: Talisman Energy Inc., Carigali Hess Operating Co., and Petrofac. DataNet2 utilizes the technological advances of rich Internet applications and the Web2 environment to bring upstream reporting to a new level.
Meanwhile, IDS has launched its new website at www.idsdatanet.com. The new site includes more extensive information on how the DataNet2 suite of products works in practice and how WITSML is being utilized to increase the ease and speed of use for clients.
IDS provides intuitive, end-to-end, web-delivered, upstream reporting services, with full support around the clock. IDS supports the drilling project life cycle from initial concept to final decommissioning.
Sensornet,
Elstree, UK, has announced Pacific Ex as its downstream process agent for Australia. Pacific Ex will represent Sensornet’s digital pipeline monitoring solutions, including pipeline leak detection and pipeline integrity monitoring technology, across Australia. The partnership will further strengthen Sensornet’s position in the region as the industry-leading supplier of fiber optic monitoring products and services.
Launched in 1998, Sensornet provides advanced asset monitoring solutions, using real-time distributed temperature and strain measuring systems.
Pacific Automation, the parent company of Pacific Ex, has been an Australian industry specialist since 1969. The company is connected to leading global manufacturers to provide complete solutions for industrial automation and control.
Noble Denton,
London, has doubled the size of its detail design engineering office in Sharjah. The expansion was necessitated by the growth of the company’s Sharjah staff to more than 80, accommodating a significant recent expansion of business in the past year. The office is responsible for taking a client’s base vessel design concept, customizing it, and ensuring that the project is feasible and built to specification. The office employs a wide rage of engineers, including naval architects and structural, mechanical, piping, electrical, and instrumentation engineers.
With a long established presence in the major oil and gas markets worldwide, Noble Denton provides life-cycle marine and offshore engineering services to the oil and gas and renewable industries.
Seismic Micro-Technology,
Houston, has announced the first sale of the company’s KINGDOM 1D Forward Modeling (1DFM) software, to Seismic Ventures Inc., Stafford, Tex. The software interactively models lithologic and reservoir fluid properties to show the effect on seismic traces and tie geology and seismic. This module, fully integrated with KINGDOM, is the first major offering to provide easy-to-use AVO modeling and fluid workshop capabilities in one place. Seismic Venture’s use of 1DFM will enable the company to further enhance its modeling services and provide clients a comparison of real and synthetic seismic data to make geological inferences from the data. The resulting model from this analysis can be iteratively changed to accurately match real seismic data.
Seismic Micro-Technology is a market leader for Windows-based geoscientific interpretation systems. Its software enables intuitive interpretation, validation, risk reduction, and data management in one integrated executable
Seismic Ventures, founded in 1994, reduces exploration risk by providing innovative seismic services to the global oil and gas exploration industry. Seismic Ventures offers seismic data processing solutions, AVO, and direct hydrocarbon analysis and modeling, as well as frequency and amplitude-based attributes.
InterMoor do Brasil Ltda.,
Rio de Janeiro, has named Osvaldo Lorca project director. Previously, he worked for InterMoor for 2 years as a senior engineer, serving as project engineer and project manager for the Shell BC-10 and Repsol BM-S-48 projects. He also served as a mooring installation engineer and supervisor. Lorca previously was a senior project engineer with Petrobras, working on MODU mooring design and installation, as well as on various floating production, storage, and offloading vessel installations that used torpedo piles.
InterMoor, an Acteon company, is a leading supplier of mooring technology, providing solutions for rig moves and mooring services, including engineering and design, fabrication, and subsea installation.
Acteon is a group of specialist engineering companies serving the global oil and gas industry.
