$3.3m deal raises Flotech's global profile

An Auckland engineering firm has boosted its international exposure with a multimillion-dollar deal as part of an Mexican oil-processing project.

Mangere Bridge-based Flotech built two utility compressors worth more than US$2 million ($3.3 million) for Norwegian firm Kanfa AS for use on a giant oil-processing ship used by Mexican oil giant PEMEX.

Flotech's director of compression technology, Stephen Rowntree, said Kanfa were looking for two separate compressors to tackle two distinct challenges and had been quoted lead times of more than a year.

"After careful analysis it occurred to us that we could solve both challenges with a single packaged solution," Rowntree said.

Flotech's compressor will provide the fuel gas boost for power generation on board the ship and simultaneously provide gas compression used as part of the processing equipment.

The single enormous design stands 3m tall, weighs in at 32 tonnes and took just 35 weeks to complete.

Flotech won the contract last September after only days of negotiation, bucking a common trend of waiting years after making a quote.

"Within the space of not knowing that the job even existed to say two weeks later we were basically into detailed design," Rowntree said.

Flotech employs about 60 staff at its Mangere Bridge manufacturing plant but also has offices in Australia, Singapore and Sweden, with more than 90 per cent of revenue now being generated offshore.

In many ways its size and location helped rather than hindered the company, Rowntree said.

"Our business survival in a global world requires us to be more adaptive and flexible to our customers' needs than our global competitors can be," he said. "We are not a mass producer of standardised product.

"Our goal really is to meet the customer's requirements and give him a solution he actually wants, not something he has to live with because it was the closest he could get to what he wanted."

The compressors, one of which serves as a backup, will be used on the Berge Enterprise - a floating oil production, storage and off-loading vessel which has a storage capacity of more than 2,000,000 barrels.

The floating plant in the Gulf of Mexico will process oil before storing it in its hold and acting as a transport hub for about 600,000 barrels a day.

The vessel's Norwegian owners, Bergesen, will operate the Enterprise for PEMEX and had contracted Kanfa to refit the ship's topside modules.

The company is also involved in the bio-gas industry, developing technology to take carbon dioxide out of the gas produced by decomposing rubbish. The remaining pure methane can be used as an alternative to traditional fuels.

"We are always willing to talk to anyone in the biogas, gas compression and heat exchange industries about their challenges, not just around the world but here in New Zealand," Rowntree said. "We understand and appreciate that leading-edge engineering solutions can be a key part of enabling New Zealand businesses to [achieve] success commercially."