The Kuala Lumpur and Selangor branch held its second lunch time meeting of 2015 on Thursday 9th April as a lunchtime session at the Malaysian Petroleum Club. Following the recent trend for steadily increasing attendance over 50 turned up for this “themed” session. All three speakers covered aspects of flexible pipe use in oil and gas fields with talks covering design, lessons learned and installation and field applications. First Marin Abélanet engineering director for Subsea 7 in the region spoke with great experience on installation and configuration of flexible pipe primarily in the riser role, with pictures and examples of successfully installed flexible risers. Hanh Ha of 2H Offshore followed Marin and gave a lively and interesting talk entitled “Procurement Risk Management of Flexible Pipes and Umbilicals” in this he drew attention to the key role of QA/QC in the procurement process and how lack of attention to detail when manufacturing or installing can lead to huge impacts on schedule and costs. The final presentation was given by CS Tan of flexible team leader for GE Wellstream in the region. This talk focused on the design of pipe and its application to field specific uses. The talk finished with an overview of some beneficial technology for flexible pipe that GE have under development.

As usual the presentations were followed by a networking lunch and the monthly network meeting was held the same day at Table 23 bistro in KL. A crowd of around 20 members managed to get along through heavy rain and traffic to meet and discuss relevant topics. The next lunch meeting will be in June and a monthly network meeting especially aimed at young engineers will be held the second Thursday of each month at Table 23 Jalan Mesui.