US engineering and construction group Fluor has consolidated South Africa as its regional “hub” and, besides maintaining its local focus, is concentrating much of its growth energy on the opportunities set to arise as a result of major discoveries of gas reserves in neighbouring Mozambique.

Senior VP Energy and Chemicals for Europe, Africa and Middle-East Taco de Haan tells Engineering News Online that Mozambique has a similar potential for Fluor as when Sasol undertook the development of its petrochemicals complex in Secunda during the 1970s and 1980s.

The company first entered South Africa in 1960, when it did work on the Sasol styrene butadiene project, in Sasolburg, and the Caltex refinery, in Cape Town.

It is best known, though, for the central role it played in the development of South Africa’s coal- and gas-to-liquids industry, having established a permanent 
engineering office in Johannesburg in 1979 to pursue oil refining, chemicals, mining and power prospects.

The NYSE-listed company recently moved into a new, ‘green’ office complex in Woodmead, north of Johannesburg, from where it remains serving the local market and is planning a more concerted assault on well-defined sub-Saharan African market opportunities, notably in Mozambique and Tanzania.

In total, it employs about 700 people in South Africa, 300 of whom are based at the new head office. Globally, the Irving, Texas-headquartered group employs more than 40 000 people and reported revenues of $27.6-billion in 2012, positioning it 110th on the Fortune 500 ranking.

De Haan is particularly enthused by the prospects for mega-scale greenfield gas projects in Mozambique, where Fluor and JGC, of Japan, are jointly working on a front-end engineering and design (FEED) for an onshore liquified natural gas (LNG) facility being pursued by
Anadarko.

Located in the Cabo Delgado province, 2 000 km north-east of Maputo, the FEED will deliver designs for the initial phase of an LNG project comprising four trains, where each train is capable of producing five-million metric tons a year, or a combined 20-million tons. There is potential to expand the facility’s capacity to about 50-million tons, with gas derived from the Offshore Area 1, operated by Anadarko, and Offshore Area 4, operated by Eni. The first LNG cargo is targeted for 2018.

The Fluor-JGC design will compete against two others being developed by Bechtel and a joint venture between CB&I and Chiyoda. The FEEDs, together with capital estimates, which are likely to run into the double-digit billions of dollars, are scheduled for delivery by the end of the year.

However, De Haan stresses that the investment into the South African “anchor office” also signals the company’s continued commitment to South Africa, where it still has a solid baseload of mostly brownfield energy, chemicals and mining projects as well as sees potential for growth in the power industry.

It was recently awarded the FEED for the Sapref ‘Clean Fuels II’ refinery upgrade, in Durban, and is hoping to be awarded yet more work related to the country’s cleaner fuels transition.

He believes that South Africa will continue to provide a solid baseload of work, with its proximity to sub-Saharan African prospects playing an increasing role over time.

“People think of Fluor as a company that is only involved in megaprojects. But in reality we also engage in a number of smaller brownfields projects in the $1-million to $10-million range and we have a solid pipeline of ongoing small, medium and larger projects across the energy, chemicals and mining sectors in South Africa,” De Haan concludes.