Multinational oilfield services group National Oilwell Varco is planning to build a new multi-million-pound rig base in Dundee or Angus.
The firm’s rig systems division has just moved its management and technical support function into a new office at Dundee’s West Pitkerro Industrial Estate.
However, The Courier can reveal that the new facility is only a stop-gap measure designed to relieve pressure on the firm’s long-standing re-manufacturing workshops at Forties Road in Montrose and create much-needed extra space.
Technical support manager Shaun Crowther said the firm’s long-term vision was to establish a new-build operations centre in the area.
The new facility would require an investment of up to £8 million by Houston-headquartered NOV and would eventually lead to a considerable expansion of the firm’s workforce in the region.
Plans for the facility have yet to reach the drawing board, but it is expected that NOV will shortly engage a third-party contractor to progress designs for the new office building and research potential locations.
“We are projecting growth of 15% year-on-year for the foreseeable future and we were looking for an office building that would allow us to free up space in Montrose and expand here in Dundee,” Mr Crowther said.
He said they took over the old Brown Construction premises and have worked through a refurbishment process over the past six to eight weeks, and have now migrated 39 staff over from Montrose.
“We will be growing staff levels down here in Dundee over the next couple of years to around 70-ish.
“Our aim in the future is to build a purpose-built office complex in the Dundee or Angus area to house our service, engineering and training departments, with the workshop remaining in Montrose.
“The general idea is that we build for a 10-year plan, but we purchase land for a 20-year plan.”
In the meantime, a core of around 40 staff have relocated to NOV’s new Dundee office from Montrose, where staff numbers remain north of 300.
Mr Crowther said establishing NOV’s first office in the city had been a logical step as a large number of staff lived in the town or in the surrounding areas and currently faced a considerable daily commute.
“We took staff’s domestic locations into consideration, and basically the transit mileage per week of everybody commuting to Montrose was approximately 3,000 miles.
“We plotted everyone in geographically and looked for the most central location which was, in fact, Dundee.”
However, Mr Crowther said the city offered a whole lot more to NOV than just an easy drive to work.
“It (Dundee) has great potential for the North Sea and elsewhere and it has got an able working population,” Mr Crowther said.
“It is expensive to operate in Aberdeen and at the moment there is not the development ground available in Montrose, so logically you are looking at Brechin, Forfar or Dundee. They have all got potential.
“In this tighter market I think you will have more and more firms looking further south to develop.
“It is a mature market in the North Sea so companies have to be more competitive, and Dundee is a more competitive place to be,” he said.