Petrofac set for growth

Thank you for having me.

Absolutely. So, great announcement, really happy about the award. It's a project for ADNOC carbon capture and it's the largest carbon capture project in the Middle East region. It's going to take out about 1.5 million tons of carbon. It's an EPC project, so we're building the carbon capture facilities, all the associated infrastructure, the pipeline to allow the collection of the carbon and the injection back in the field. So really great. This combines our experience in the energy transition with our Middle East execution experience, so really happy about that.

I joined on April 1st, so it's been six months and it's been busy, it's been exciting. You know, I've been 30 years in the industry from my previous employer, so a lot of the clients and the locations are similar. Great team at Petrofac, really strong people. It's been through kind of a down cycle, so we're looking at the up cycle. Big focus on rebuilding the backlog, rebuilding the brand in the region. In the first four to five months, we were able to increase our backlog significantly. Lots of new awards, diverse awards. The award for ADNOC, that's the second ADNOC award this year, so over a billion dollars of backlog just with that. In total, just over $5 billion of awards, a combination of traditional hydrocarbon business, our OpEx business which is the Asset Solutions business, as well as the energy transition projects, which is really on the back of the big award from TotalEnergies for the offshore HVDC stations.

It's our home market. Petrofac has been here over 30 years, delivered many projects for all the national oil companies and all their partners here in the region. We're very strong in each of the countries, great track record. For example, here in the Emirates, we've got our big execution office in Sharjah, over 300 or 400 people. We're able to achieve very high local content, we hire a lot of local talent. Just in our office in Sharjah, we have over 100 Emiratis working for us and they've been deployed on the new projects. So great history here, it's going to be the backbone of the company going forward. Big capex here in the area and we'll continue to invest in our delivery here in the Middle East.

We look at it in three aspects. The first aspect, we have a business, the Asset Solutions business, that's moving into decommissioning. So that's taking facilities out and it's a big growing business. It started off in the North Sea, we've moved over to Australia, Gulf Coast of Mexico. So that's one part. The other part is to design and build lower carbon intensity hydrocarbon facilities, which is some of the projects we're working on in the E&C side of the business. And the third part is really the new energies, the energy transition part, focused mainly on HVDC today because that's where the big capex is, but we also have very strong technical capability working on projects in green hydrogen, carbon capture, waste-to-value, and other aspects. So really excited about that side of the business.

Yeah, absolutely. Part of the focus is also to reduce our carbon footprint. When we go out and build projects, we're working very hard to reduce our carbon footprint and there's a lot of programs in place to do that. That's not only in the way we engineer or construct our works, but all the way through our supply chain.

The markets are robust. In our home regions here in the Middle East, there's big capital investment programs which you probably heard about here today at ADIPEC. So we're well positioned for that. Our Asset Solutions business, focused on the OpEx side, we're growing that geographically into areas like West Africa, Australia, outside of our home market which is the North Sea. And the energy transition projects, there's huge capital expenditure in offshore wind, but also we see some of these other projects in energy transition like waste-to-value going into final investment decisions in the next two to three years. So where I see the company in the next three years is really to capitalize on this, to rebuild our backlog, and also to grow our talent pool. One of the areas which we as an industry need to do better at is to attract more people. So we're hiring, we've started a graduate training program that's been running for the last few years, we've hired over 100 new graduates. We're also working on training and upskilling of our current staff and trying to improve our retention rate. Our people are our assets. We don't have any other fixed assets other than people. So we really invest in our people and that's the key to our successful delivery.

Thank you very much, Julia, and thank you for having me.