Located in Houston’s Energy Corridor, DNV’s expansive new offices will serve as the headquarters for the organisation’s activities in the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, providing leading technical expertise and a broad range of services to the energy and maritime industries.
While DNV has been active in Houston and the Americas for decades, rising demand for the organisation’s services has resulted in strong growth. Recognising a need to expand its presence in this dynamic region, DNV signed a long-term lease for a large building in Katy, Texas last year and announced on 1 April 2010 that the site would serve as the organisation’s divisional headquarters and approval centre for the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa. Today, the new offices are home to about 150 personnel with the expertise and in-house resources to provide a broad range of risk management services.
Led by Elisabeth Tørstad, who has extensive experience in cleaner energy and offshore, pipeline and materials technologies, DNV’s new offices will not only serve as the headquarters for DNV’s new divisional set-up but also enable the organisation to improve its customer focus in Houston’s dynamic energy, offshore and maritime segments. “In addition to quality classification services, DNV has long been recognised for its technical expertise,” she says. “This allows us to provide advanced risk management services, which we can tailor to meet the specific requirements of local companies.”
In addition to providing risk management services, DNV Houston also acts as an approval centre and an industry resource for valuable information, ranging from the impact of new regulations to critical emerging safety and environmental issues. “Part of our role is to produce, analyse and share information that is important to the industries we serve,” she says. “At the same time, our role in organising various committees enables us to listen to the concerns of industry players and align our services more closely with their demands.”
A focus on customer service
Ray Fales, DNV’s Market and Business Development Director, says that while DNV has earned a strong reputation in Houston, the organisation is facing some real challenges. “We are not the biggest class society in Houston, which means we have to be a little bit better to win the trust of new customers,” he says. “We have realigned our business to improve the customer experience and prioritised the development of services that genuinely add value, but we still have some work to do.”
Fales explains that, in addition to the development of new, more targeted class notations, DNV is working to improve response times. “While we will continue to benefit from DNV’s class development resources in Norway, we now have the in-house expertise and technical competence to handle just about any request,” he says. “We don’t have to worry about time-zones anymore.”
Offshore & Maritime
Kenneth Vareide, who is responsible for DNV’s activities in the maritime and offshore sectors, says that the organisation’s expanded presence and recent years’ success in Houston are changing the market’s perceptions. “In the past, we have sometimes been viewed as a classification society headquartered in Europe and we occasionally lost opportunities to local class societies,” he says. “We have now turned this around and demonstrated that we have local capabilities and expertise that can make a significant difference to American industry – not only as a classification society but also as a quality risk management company to ensure safe and sustainable business performance.”
Vareide points out that DNV’s remarkable global success in offshore class in the past five years has enabled the organisation to build strong capabilities and a significant track record in Houston. He emphasises that this has been based on DNV’s understanding of safety and asset risk management for units operating in challenging environments and deep waters. “We don’t view classification as a commodity but instead as an integral part of an overall safety and asset risk management philosophy,” he says. “And with the trend towards more deep and ultra deepwater subsea developments in remote locations, we are well positioned for the market opportunities that lie ahead.”
While he acknowledges that DNV has not historically had a strong presence in the jack-up and offshore service vessels (OSV) segments in the Gulf, Vareide is confident that with the renewed focus on customer service, strong technical capabilities and continuous development of new or revised optional notations, such as the DNV Silent notation for well intervention units and OSVs, the organisation is well positioned for growth. “It’s an exciting and challenging market, but we’re here to provide the alternative that companies are looking for,” he says.
Energy
DNV’s Regional Manager (Energy), Peter Bjerager, says that the US energy market is undergoing rapid change. “Developments in the US economy have led to a new focus on cost and, as energy infrastructure continues to age, we have seen greater demand for SHE and asset risk management services,” he says. “At the same time, rising public and private investment in cleaner energy technologies is driving developments in wind, solar and tidal power generation and carbon capture technologies.”
Worldwide, DNV has about 800 personnel dedicated to serving the energy industry, and about half of these are in North America, providing services related to asset management, technical verification, risk management consulting and corrosion analysis. Bjerager says that DNV’s expertise in onshore and offshore pipeline corrosion issues has been a genuine advantage. Indeed, DNV has a global network of materials technology and testing laboratories, including a state-of-the-art facility in Dublin, Ohio that specialises in research, testing and failure analysis. The lab, which has electrochemical and mechanical instrumentation, autoclaves for high pressure and temperature exposure, flow-testing equipment, safety systems for H2S (and other poisonous gas) exposures and other tools, is perhaps the best in the world. “We have the resources – we just have to get better at communicating our skills to the market,” says Bjerager.
DNV Houston’s management team agree that raising the organisation’s profile in the Energy Corridor will not only attract new local customers but also help DNV strengthen its reputation in global markets. “It is not by accident that Houston is called the Energy Capital of the World,” says Tørstad. “and in Texas, size matters.”
Text: Alexander Wardwell