Aberdeen boost as Wood Group creates 150 oilfield services jobs

ENERGY services heavyweight Wood Group is creating 150 jobs at its Production Services Network (PSN) division in Aberdeen as it gears up to grab a share of the £30 billion oil and gas decommissioning market.

The FTSE 250 company is setting up a dedicated project delivery team at Wood Group PSN to help win large-scale contracts in UK waters.

The oil and gas project market worldwide is valued at nearly £100bn a year, according to the group, with 30 per cent of the opportunities coming in the brownfield projects sector.

Wood Group has already created 1,000 jobs in the UK so far this year, taking its workforce in Britain to more than 8,300 staff.

Andy Mackay, projects business manager at Wood Group PSN, said: “We have had great success winning and retaining engineering and construction, operations and maintenance and integrated service contracts. Our ambition is to further develop Wood Group PSN’s project delivery CV and provide our customers with dedicated project capability, within or independent of existing contracts.”

Mackay added: “We see many of our current and potential customers making significant capital investments in their installations to maximise production volumes. While we are undertaking studies and some project work in all these areas, we are further developing our capability to offer comprehensive support to all phases of a project from study to hook-up and commissioning.”

News of the jobs comes after Wood Group last week reported a “solid start” to its financial year, with first-half profits at its engineering division expected to be up 30 per cent from last year’s $72.5 million (£46.4m).

The PSN division is also forecast to show an “improved performance” compared with 2011.