RE: Alma22 Jan 2026 11:07
Alma posted this.
Anything sound familiar?28 Jun 2024 21:39
I have seen all this before, and I play snooker, not chess.
When I was a younger woman working in the procurement department of an oilfield company, we had an offshore project funding problem, and FID was delayed by 12 months because of JV partner lack of working capital.
We had a fixed budget of $30M to progress the engineering effort while the funding was sorted out. Every third project employee was laid off. Purchase orders were issued for all long lead items with deposits of $10 as a consideration for the vendors’ detailed designs, so that the project detailed designer, Brown &Root, could integrate everything, and they mostly agreed to that. There was only one objector, so we sent round a QA inspector to condemn his premises. He fell in line pretty quickly afterwards!
The production vessel had been selected, with LOI, but no contract had yet been signed. Its name was a company secret (even though we all knew it) and it was given a code name “Threlge”. It was commercially confidential to avoid the owner thinking it was an irreversible decision and so jacking up the price. The real name was only disclosed publicly after contract signing.
Does anything sound familiar?