AG&P sets up US engineering unit

Filipino firm Atlantic Gulf and Pacific Company (AG&P) announced that it has formed an engineering unit in the United States (US) to further strengthen its manpower force across the chain of the liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry.

This has been done through its AG&P Engineering, Inc. that had been set up in Houston, which is in the so-called energy powerhouse of America.

With this new business segment, the company noted that it would be able to “develop innovative LNG infrastructure assets to serve the needs of power, mining, transportation and industrial users in emerging economies.”

Its target markets for engineering manpower deployment would be Philippines, India and Indonesia – known to have vast off-grid potential for break-bulk LNG technology rollouts.

AG&P’s engineering unit in Houston will be headed by Alfred Moujaes, declared by the Filipino firm to have “extensive experience in the refining and power generation industries,” including those on onshore and floating LNG production facilities.

He will be joined in the team by Nancy Ballout, formerly with Black &Veatch Corporation, to be its Vice President for Process Operations; David Franklin as Vice President for Engineering; Julio Rios as Vice President for Technology; Charles Rice as Principal Piping Engineer; Ali Aga as Project Manager for Engineering, Procurement an Construction; and Lima Wang as Principle Process Engineer.

Moujaes noted that “despite the competitive cost and high demand for LNG, projects have suffered from inertia because of a lack of the right infrastructure and the prohibitively high cost of developing it, creating a distribution gap for off-grid consumers.”

He added that the company’s engineering unit intends to “bridge (the) gap by providing fast-track, scalable engineering designs for any and all parts of the LNG supply chain.”

Moujaes emphasized that “costs are substantially reduced by having an in-house engineering team because project delays and overall cost increases are often attributed to bespoke third party engineering.”

Even in the Philippines, the target of AG&P would be to get into the needed power infrastructure base of the off-grid areas.

Nevertheless, as policy directions and the gas industry reset are still up for reshaping, prospective development and technology deployments have yet to take off from blueprints.