May 2010

SPED in the UK & Eire

Review Training day planned near London

We are grateful for the help that American based corporate members have given us, but we are sorry to say that the UK market for training piping engineers continues to appear flat.

We are offering a good price for a day’s training and the certification test.  We are prepared to do the training in any location to suit a break-even number of delegates.  But so far the response has been disappointing.

We will continue to persevere and hope that pick-up will be swift as the new Government settles in and the summer holidays are out of the way.

UK Process Industry News

Of course the oil leak in the Gulf dominates our world and technical news.

Our other big news is the coalition government.  The first since the one during WWII.  And of course in the prevailing economic climate it is of vital importance to the E&C sector in the UK.  We need backing for nuclear stations and confidence to go for more LNG storage and transmission capacity.  The prospect of power blackout beyond 2015 is very real.  It is ironic that a growing economy will hasten the time when blackouts are likely and they could throttle a growing economy.  It is perverse that even tightening emission regulations will make many power stations uneconomic to operate.  Oh for the day when engineers run the world!

There are 8 sub-sea gas pipelines under construction.  But Russia is at one end of them all.  The UK is the second customer in line for several.  In a recent article in UK’s “the Engineer, the Russian President says that this contributes to our security I do not quite follow.  Stable operations should be fine, but suppose someone want to exert pressure, by reducing the pressure? 

Norman Harris

Norman.harris@20cc.co.uk