Bigger benefits for engineers abroad



By Robin Bromby

Engineering opportunities in the oil and gas sector are now chronically bad, according to the peak professional body.

While there has long been a debate about Australia doing more downstream value-adding to its resources, rather than just pump or dig and then ship, it now seems there’s a crisis at the other end of the scale.

According to a survey by the Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers Australia, as much as 90 per cent of the up-front design work for the large oil and gas projects is being done abroad.

Not only does that deprive Australia of the income for that work, APESMA says it means we are not developing a cadre of engineers with those specialist skills.

Engineers want not only the bread-and-butter work – such as designing a bridge across a railway line, for example – but to gain the skills required for large oil and gas installations.

Association director of planning and development Paul Davies says local engineers are missing out on the most innovative and interesting work in the sector.

“It’s all going to Yokohama, Houston and London,” he says.

APESMA surveyed 700 engineers for its latest report, Resource Boom for Whom?

About 95 per cent of the respondents are concerned that so much work for Australian liquefied natural gas projects is going offshore.

It cites the North-West Shelf. The design work for LNG trains one and two was done in Yokohama, for trains three and four in Perth, while train five and Pluto train one were designed in London.

There was a small Perth involvement in the Gorgon LNG design; the Wheatstone platform, while managed from Perth, is being worked on in Kuala Lumpur, while the rest of the Wheatstone work is being undertaken in Houston.

One of the engineers surveyed complains: “I don’t understand why our natural resources are allowed to be used by any company, foreign or otherwise, without certain conditions being attached to the development, such as minimum local content in design, construction and fabrication.”

Fabrication is another issue: much of that work is being done in China rather than Perth.

Although the mining industry has its beef with the federal government over the mining tax, APESMA believes the problem for our engineering sector lies with the West Australian government, the entity that issues the permits for resource developments and specifies conditions.

Those conditions should include stipulations that some of the design engineering be carried out in Australia, Davies says.

It is not a matter of cost: engineers in places such as Houston and London cost as much as ones here.
And that leads on the second big finding in the survey.

Forty-six per cent of the engineers who responded said they had lost pay and conditions when the global financial crisis hit. Worse still, 25 per cent of the engineers surveyed had lost their jobs because of the GFC.

Many of those people are still working reduced hours or earning at a lower level.

Davies says the resurgence in the resources sector since the GST has passed many engineers by, with much of the new flow of jobs being sent offshore.

APESMA is arguing that, without proper workforce planning and long-term skills investment, there is a serious risk that the investment of billions of dollars in the resources sector will benefit only the company concerned and not the wider Australian economy.

Article from The Australian, August 14, 2010.