The oil business has come a long way since the days when industry pioneers watched it gush uncontrollably from the ground, but the fundamentals remain the same - find it, get it out of the earth, process it and sell it.

If you are a graduate with a degree in chemical or process engineering, a role in the industry might seem like the natural place for your talents. Less so, you might think, if you are a mechanical engineer. But Andrew Webster has shown that mechanical engineers are also very much in demand in the oil and gas sector.

For the last year Webster, a graduate of Imperial College London, has been working at the giant Shell refinery in Fredericia in Denmark, where he has been given the responsibility for the care and reliability of the site’s rotating equipment.

Because the processing of oil is a continuous rather than a batch process, monitoring and maintaining the equipment is vital to maximising the capacity of the operation, and hence its profitability.

Webster’s role is to ensure that the steam turbines, pumps, compressors and blowers that keep the oil, steam and water flowing through the plant are all running at their optimum performance.

Working with a team of reliability engineers, his task involves developing and deploying condition monitoring equipment and analysing the data from that equipment to keep track of the state of the rotating equipment.

He is also responsible for scheduling critical equipment maintenance and repair to ensure minimum downtime, and ensuring that any new equipment installed at the plant meets the demands placed on it.

But there is much more to his role than straightforward engineering work.

‘Working on any project involves pulling together a team to define specific goals and then achieve them. That has as much to do with inter-personal skills as it does with simply applying your knowledge of engineering to solve a problem,’ said Webster.

‘Co-operating with others and communicating effectively can be as challenging as engineering.’

Webster was introduced to the Shell concept of teamwork when he enrolled on the Shell Gourami business challenge in 2003.

He admits that his knowledge of the company was sketchy before then, but by the end of the exercise he had gained an insight into both the technical and business aspects of the oil and gas industry, and became hooked on the idea of working in it.

The aim of the week-long Gourami challenge is to expose undergraduates to the gamut of activities in Shell’s energy business, from the upstream exploration and production operations, to downstream refining and marketing, as well as the servicing operations that support them, such as finance and human resources.

Webster and his colleagues were challenged with the goal of optimising the output of a hypothetical refinery, developing a business plan based on their ideas, then presenting it to senior Shell leaders.

At the end of the event, each team and its members were assessed based on their performance in the challenge, and selected successful individuals were offered a full-time position within Shell.

Webster was one of them. He said: ‘The challenge was a big part of why I decided to pursue a position at the company further.’

That was three years ago. In 2004, after he graduated from Imperial with an MEng degree in mechanical engineering, Shell offered him a position as a rotating machinery specialist at its Global
Solutions consultancy business based in The Netherlands. Since then, Webster has not looked back.

The Global Solutions arm of Shell provides consultancy, technical services and research and development expertise to the energy and processing industries both inside and outside the company, and its employees can be called upon for a limited time to do work on any number of specific projects.

Webster was involved in supporting the company’s liquefied natural gas business by reviewing the designs of a range of compressors used in gas turbines. These were to be deployed at new liquefied natural gas plants in Nigeria and Oman that the company was considering building at the time.

Nine months later, Webster’s expertise in rotating machinery was called upon again, when the company offered him a position at Shell Chemicals, or more specifically, its Pernis-Moerdijk refinery and chemicals complex in The Netherlands.

The Pernis-Moerdijk complex is a tightly coupled operation. Naphtha, gasoil and liquid petroleum gas made at the Pernis Shell refinery are transferred by pipeline to its Moerdijk facility, which then processes them into products such as ethylene, propylene, cracked gasoil, hydrogen, ethylene cracked residue and acetylene.

Webster was not only challenged by the idea of supporting the rotating equipment on both the plants but was also excited by the idea of learning the Dutch language so he could communicate his technical knowledge and experience more effectively with the Dutch engineers.

On the technical front, ‘one of my main tasks there was to develop a condition monitoring system for all the rotating equipment at both plants and, based on how it was performing, decide whether to repair it, stop it or overhaul it,’ he said.

Webster led the two-year project and was responsible for implementing it. He was put in charge of a team of six other engineers.

First, team members needed to ascertain what technical criteria would need to be monitored on each piece of equipment in the plant before they got down to specifying the equipment to perform the monitoring.

‘Based on our knowledge of how each piece of equipment failed, we had to draw up a list of specific parameters we needed to measure to be able to predict when that was likely to happen,’ he said.

‘Knowing that, we then had to decide whether we might be able to make that measurement and, if so, how often we needed to do so. Then, we had to specify what technology would enable us to perform each of the measurement and acquisition tasks most appropriately.’

Webster claimed: ‘The technical bit was easy. The real task was to ensure that key milestones were met in a timely fashion, and that all the engineers involved in the project embraced its goals.’

After two and a half years at Shell Chemicals, Webster was offered a position as the head of rotating equipment at the Fredericia plant. This an enormous complex where 25 per cent of the total amount of oil pumped from the North Sea is processed and refined into petrol, diesel fuel, heating oil, kerosene and liquefied petroleum gas.

Webster is now part of a reliability team at the plant and is responsible for ensuring the operation of the rotating equipment on the entire site, checking that the equipment is being run and maintained correctly and that new plant is selected and installed properly.

He said he has enjoyed his years at the company, which have given him an opportunity to increase his expertise in his chosen field of rotating equipment, as well as giving him the prospect of becoming a Chartered Member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

Want to join Shell? Take the Gourami Business Challenge and you could receive an offer of full employment. Apply now on: www.shell.com/careers/