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Personally Speaking - Ken Taylor

October 2005
Ken Taylor is General Manager of Kuwait Shell Limited and Shell Country Chairman for Kuwait. He retires from Shell in December after a career of 30 years and talks to 'Shell in the Middle East' about his roots, the highlights of his career and his aspirations for life after Shell...

Q. Where were you born, brought up and educated?

I was born in Whitby, in Yorkshire, in the cold winter of 1947 in a convent hospital. My father was Station Master for the London North East Railway Company and he ran the small country station of Glaisdale.

I have one younger sister who today lives in Richmond, Surrey, in the south of England, and works on the front-line in service provision for the local authority.

During my childhood I grew up in a succession of small country railway stations in Yorkshire and Durham in the north of England. In those days the railways were an important part of everyone's life and held a great deal of mystique and interest, especially for young boys. Rail travel was the major method of transport for both passengers and freight in the country districts, so the Station Master was quite an important figure in the local community.

We lived in a host of grand old Victorian houses at the station, but we had no electricity. It was a great era. I got to ride on a lot of trains, which of course at that time were all coal-fired steam engines. What I now recall most about those days was the ever-present spirit of teamwork and service to the public.

After several years we moved to Teeside, again in the north of England, where I went to secondary school. My father was promoted to Area Manager in charge of passenger train services in the area, and our gypsy lifestyle came to an end.

For me, the startling thing about Teeside was the pollution, which was terrible in the 1950s. The industrial Teeside was so different from living in the pure, clean English countryside. My grandfather was Mayor of a neighbouring town, Middlesborough, and spent over 40 years as a politician in the town, where he campaigned tirelessly against pollution and in favour of better working conditions and improved health services. He was a big influence on me.

I left Teeside and went off to university in Nottingham to study civil engineering. After three years I graduated with first class honours and went on to do a PhD, also in civil engineering. At university I got stuck into all sorts of extra- curricular interests, but archaeology was, and still is, one of my favourite topics.

Q. How did your career begin?

After university I applied for a job with a John Mowlem subsidiary, a company called Soil Mechanics Limited, which was specialising in soil mechanics and foundation engineering, and this, of course, had been my research subject at university.

It was a fascinating job. I was able to put into practice what I had learned at university and I travelled all over Wales and the West Country. The job involved conducting investigations into ground conditions prior to the designing of roads and other civil engineering projects.

After 18 months I saw an advertisement for a job as a technical journalist, working for the 'New Civil Engineer' magazine in London. To others it seemed quite a strange thing to do at that point of my career. However, I saw it as an interesting opportunity to learn more about the engineering industry and follow a passion to improve communication which, at that time, seemed to me to lack immediacy and interest, and consisted entirely of out-of-date learned papers.

It turned out to be a challenging one and a half years. I was sent all over the country and to Europe to report on various events and subjects of interest to our readers.

One of my most memorable commissions on the magazine was to report on the volcanic eruption of the Icelandic island of Heimey. This was a unique opportunity to visit a live volcanic eruption and to see what the engineering world was doing to try to prevent the lava flows from inundating the town.

Another memorable commission was in 1973 when there was a very big fire in the UK. It was memorable because it happened at a leisure centre called Summerland, at which 50 people died. This was a terrible incident to have to report on and it had a profound impact on me.

At that time I was joined in London by my girlfriend of the time, Ann, whom I had met at university in Nottingham while she was working for ICI. We were married in 1974 in Dorset in the southwest of England, where Ann came from, and Dorset remains my home in the UK today and a base for my daughters and I.

Q. When did you start working for Shell?

I decided that I needed to become a real engineer again and applied for a job with the South East Road Construction Company, which was designing the M25 motorway in England. I lasted just 10 weeks before I saw an advertisement for a job with Shell. This was a job to work once again as a soils engineer, supervising the sea bed investigations being undertaken prior to the installation of the many offshore structures which were being planned for the North Sea.

So in 1974 I joined Shell UK in London working for the Exploration & Production business, running their Foundation Investigations work for the Brent, Dunlin and Cormorant fields.

At 27 that was quite a job to have as I was responsible for hiring and managing consultants, contractors and survey vessels. At this time what we were doing was real state-of-the-art work as no-one had ever done this sort of thing before.

The nature of the forces on the seabed for the planned structures were different to existing experience. A lot of research was therefore needed into glacial clay soils together with careful site investigations to prove the suitability of the sea bed sites for eventual platform locations, and to design the base and piles of the structures.

One of the most memorable impacts the team made through the use of soil mechanics was to bring about a change in the locations of the Brent Alpha and Brent Bravo. The solution we came up with avoided the need for expensive insert piling, with which other North Sea operators were struggling, and that brought about a saving of 20 million pounds. At that time this was the cost of the structure itself!

I was doing well at Shell and enjoying my job in the field of soil mechanics and foundations. So when, after three years, I was invited to join Shell International on a posting to The Hague. I was intrigued. The job was to work in the structural design group, where, as part of a team of specialists, I was involved in the design of the Fulmar wellhead jacket which stood in the middle of the North Sea.

After this I got involved in the project engineering side of a variety of different projects, including a brine plant in The Netherlands. A notable project was the South Oman development for PDO [Petroleum Development Oman], which included the first phase of development of the Marmul field, and the pipeline to the north.

Q. When was your first overseas posting outside Europe with Shell?

In 1980 I was posted to Shell in Brunei, where we were to spend a very happy six years. My first job was as a Project Engineer in charge of the integrity of the 200-plus offshore production platforms. This included underwater inspections, maintenance and design re-evaluations.

I had several other jobs during my time in Brunei, including Project Engineer for the modification of Brunei's offshore facilities and Head of Project Economics, which broadened my view and taught me about the wider aspects of the oil and gas business.

Life in Brunei was both great fun and hard work. It was also in Brunei that my two daughters were born. Laura is my eldest and at 24 she is today working in London for Barclays Asset Management and has just given birth to a son, called Oskar. Alexis is my second daughter and at 21 she is in her third year at Cambridge University studying engineering.

After Brunei we returned to the cold and damp of Europe and Shell's main operating company in The Netherlands called NAM [Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij]. NAM is a Shell/Esso joint venture and is Shell's main gas production company in The Netherlands, producing both onshore and offshore.

Based in Assen I was responsible, with a small team, for the definition of the engineering part of the new offshore developments. This was a very rewarding time and we were able to achieve dramatic reductions in facilities costs largely through multi-discipline teamwork and a re-examination of gas contracts.

I then moved to Shell Expro in the UK, based in Lowestoft, as Head of Construction Services for the southern sector of the North Sea. When this part of the business was merged with maintenance I returned to The Hague as a Senior Information Planner in Shell International's IT (Information Technology) Department.

Q. At what stage in your career did you become more involved with the Middle East, and more specifically Kuwait? And what have been Shell's main achievements in Kuwait since your time there?

In the mid-1990s I joined a team working on Shell's development plans in Iran and subsequently joined Shell E&Ps New Business Development Team. This led to a job as Project Leader for a joint gas study with Kuwait Oil Company in 1997.

Tragically my wife, Ann, passed away in 1998 just before my eventual move to Kuwait. Bringing up two healthy daughters who were in school in the UK whilst living in Kuwait has not been easy on any of us, but they are both great girls and I am very proud of them. We have all pulled together with the help of Bea, my partner of the last few years.

In 1999 there had not been a Shell office in Kuwait for almost 20 years, and Shell's main business interests in oil and products trading were managed from London and its lubricants and chemicals businesses from Dubai, without local representation.

However, given the intention of Kuwait to open its upstream sector to investment by IOCs (International Oil Companies), I opened a new office to pursue this opportunity, as well as to develop and support Shell's other business interests, and I took up my present job as Shell Country Chairman for Kuwait.

Working in Kuwait for the last six years has been exciting and interesting. Shell has been actively involved in dialogue on the Kuwait Project, the Government's plan to invite IOCs to assist in the development of its northern oil fields. Shell is now part of an ExxonMobil-led consortium which stands ready to submit proposals as and when required.

I believe that the consortium is well-placed to provide Kuwait with what it seeks in order to increase and maintain production levels in the northern fields, whilst at the same time bringing to bear the best technology and transferring skills and training to Kuwaiti staff.

Further business developments in Kuwait include the recent signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between Shell and Kuwait Petroleum International to jointly explore various opportunities globally for projects in the downstream sector.

Shell Global Solutions now has contracts to carry out various technical study programmes in all three of Kuwait's refineries, and has been making major contributions to the improvement of standards and performance. I am very proud of all of the Shell team's achievements and they have all worked very well together to help achieve this progress across the range of Shell's businesses.

Q. How do you feel about life after Shell and what are your plans for the future?

In December of this year I will be retiring from Shell, after over 30 years, and I am very excited about this as it affords me an opportunity to do something quite different and start a new phase of my life.

I hope that I will be able to get a job with an international organisation working in the humanitarian or conservation areas to help that organisation achieve its objectives, because this is something that has interested me for some time.

Looking back on my long career with Shell, I have had the pleasure of working at jobs I have really enjoyed and I have not had to do too much I did not like. It has all been interesting, fun and exciting - and there are not too many people who can say that...!

© Shell in the Middle East 2005