RICHARD Bell has been with Hallin Marine unit Prospect since joining as an engineering graduate in July, 2005. He is an example of the kind of talent that the North Sea industry is hungry for.
Bell was promoted to a senior engineer role within a year of joining the Aberdeen firm, then team leader shortly after and, in 2007, project leader.
This young, now-chartered engineer is a 2002 MA and MEng Engineering graduate of St John’s College, Cambridge. His early engineering career experience was gained at Frazer Nash, where he was employed as an aeronautics analyst. The Frazer Nash spell exposed Bell to the tools employed by Prospect as the basis of the company’s subsea niche and competitive advantage.
Prospect says its largest contract to date, secured with Cameron, a major subsea production tree, valve and manifold manufacturer, provides excellent demonstration of Bell’s capabilities.
Indeed, he became project manager for Cameron’s Akpo SPS project, Prospect’s largest contract to date. With Akpo, which is an offshore West Africa deepwater development, Bell gained experience of thermal design for tree, jumpers and complete manifolds.
He still holds this lead role on a project that has, thus far, earned his employer more than £1.3million in revenues. Indeed, it is down to Bell’s capabilities that Prospect found itself with more work than it had initially signed up for.
Further evidence of how the offshore industry frequently gives smart young engineers their head is that this Cambridge product has also been let loose on two pieces of bespoke software that have been of direct benefit to Prospect. They are ProWorld, which is essentially a people, projects and budgets management tool, and ProCooldown which, in essence, is a software package installed on a client server, accessed through an intuitive Windows interface, to give client engineers the ability to define complex computational fluid dynamics analyses and remotely access Prospect’s CFD capability.