Kent Plc is a four-year-old company with more than 100 years of history and perhaps a name recognition problem compared to some better-known competitors.

Energy veterans will recognize some of the companies that eventually became part of Kent, which started in Ireland in 1919 as an electrical and instrument business. Over the decades, the company grew to become a major energy engineering firm that took in SNC-Lavalin Oil & Gas, Atkins Oil & Gas and Houston Offshore Engineering.

Tom Ayers joined the company as vice president of consulting about two years ago, with part of his job being to spread the word about the firm. He took questions from Hart Energy in an interview at the Offshore Technology Conference in May.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Richard Stubbe, senior technology editor, Hart Energy: What’s your background? How did you wind up at Kent?

Tom Ayers, vice president consulting, Kent: My dad worked for Shell, so I've been reading Oil & Gas Journal and stuff on the coffee table since I was a little kid. I started at an onshore gas pipeline company that’s now Duke. And then I moved to Technip for 19 years.

Then I was at SBM [Offshore] for six years. After that, my wife and I were looking to buy an engineering company, and we had three failed attempts to make that purchase. One of the brokers called me one day and he said, Kent needs you. And I was like, what do you mean, Kent? Who are they?

RS: Same question I had. Who are they?

TA: Kent is a relatively young brand, so to speak, and it's a brand that's been built out of acquisition. So I talked to the guys and said, this actually looks like it could be fun. So I didn't think I'd be selling engineering man-hours at 32 years in my career, but it's been a lot of fun. A lot of rewarding opportunities.

RS: How long have you been there?

TA: Coming up on two years.

RS: How do you explain the business to someone who isn’t familiar with it?

TA: We’re a large engineering contractor. We do some EPCs mainly in the commissioning and electrical space, and some in traditional projects. We have an end-to-end solution. Everything from pre-concept work to hookup, commissioning, startup, and then operation and maintenance.

RS: How big are you?

TA: We have about 14,000 employees in 26 countries. My group focuses on three different products. The first one is offshore, so floating systems, oil and gas, wind, power stations, anything that's wet and floats. My group does everything from the pre-concept all the way through installation of the structure itself. An offshore platform has the hull and then the top sides, and we specialize in the hull and the top side structure. It's dumb steel that's holding up the money maker.

RS: There’s no money maker without the dumb steel. How’s business?

TA: In that business, we’re just finishing the detailed engineering for Woodside, the Scarborough project in Australia. And so again, we started concept, detailed engineering, and we had engineers on site during the float over operation where they float the top sides on top of the hull and mate the two.

We'll be with them for integration and offshore commissioning and stuff like that. So that was a good project for us. We're looking for more work in that space.

RS: What else are you working on?

TA: We have a couple of products that we're talking about with our customers. One is a semi-submersible that has condensate storage in the hull. So it's kind of like an FPSO, but it's for less volume and it's for condensate.

Another one is a utility floater. Every customer we're talking to is saying they need water. So, we've designed a very efficient small semi-submersible platform that can do water injection for our customers.

RS: They need water to inject to get the oil and gas out of the reservoirs more easily?

TA: To maintain the pressure in the reservoir.

RS: Is the water that's in the ocean is not usable for this? They're surrounded by water. What do you do?

TA: Take the sea water, filter it, clean it up, remove the sulfur. Then the big thing is pump it. And so you have to pump it in high pressure to like 10,000 PSI to get it down into the river.

We're just not in the oil and gas business. We're in the water business. We think those are two areas where we have some unique technology.

RS: What’s the third?

TA: The other line is front-end studies. That’s where you start with a blank sheet of paper with your customer and you help them start out with all these prospects and then you narrow it down and you narrow it down. You end up with three at the end that you really want to go after.

RS: How does that process start?

TA: You get a bunch of people in a room and you come up with all sorts of bright ideas, and then you take those bright ideas and you start filtering them. And so you use different tools. The first one is just your noggin. Then you run different scenarios and run a capex and opex model that then tells you how much it's going to cost to build and how much it's going to cost to operate.

RS: Is this an Excel operation or are you putting artificial intelligence in it?

TA: We do use AI. It starts at high level in Excel. If there's a module that you don't have any information on, you can ask ChatGPT what it costs.

RS: I hear mixed reviews of ChatGPT? How do you know it isn’t inventing information?

TA: Part of it is you have old guys like me that've done this stuff before. My background is EPC projects, so it's easy to say that makes sense or something’s wrong here.

RS: At one of our conferences, an AI representative said he was getting pushback from companies because the technology could outperform most of the humans but not all of them. At the same time, humans using AI almost always outperform humans alone or AI alone.

TA: 100%. In the oil and gas businesses, you have thousands and thousands of data points, and then you turn it loose and tell it to look for anomalies. And so it'll start looking. And I had some data scientists come up to me and they're like, ‘Hey, we're seeing this.’ These guys look like they came from Google's headquarters, had Skittles on the table and Monster energy drinks all around.

They're like, ‘I have no idea what this is, but something went wrong.’ I tell them that's a compressor, and that's the vibration sensor on a bearing and it's going. So now let’s go fix it. A mechanic who's been working on this stuff for 30 years can walk up next to a gas turbine and listen and say something’s wrong, but those guys are retiring and there’s been no replenishment of that skill set.

RS: Liberty Energy CEO Ron Gusek told me the sensors are giving their equipment much longer life.

TA: It’s really cool.

RS: What are you focusing on now in the bigger picture?

TA: I’m trying to make sure they understand the Kent brand. In the U.S., people say, ‘Who’s Kent?’ And I was there a couple of years ago. Now that I've looked under the hood, it's really a great company. We have a lot of fun.

RS: Fun?

TA: I was telling this the other day to some of my leadership teams. Years ago, these projects, we used to have a lot of fun in oil and gas. And over the last several years, it's been just hell. And we're starting to have fun again. And so it's not that business is easy, it's not. But we're starting to have fun.

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