Derrick Zhang is a Chinese-born American who has made his name in the US offshore engineering sector, where he has worked on key developments in the Gulf of Mexico such as Shell’s Perdido spar and Chevron’s Big Foot tension-leg platform.

Zhang, who is president of Houston-based independent contractor DMAR Engineering, is now finding his deep-water expertise increasingly in demand in his native China as its oil industry looks to tap its own deep-water oil and gas potential.

Zhang was born in the coastal city of Qingdao in Shandong province in 1962 and moved to the US nearly three decades ago. In an offshore engineering career spanning more than 23 years, he has worked on high-profile projects for the likes of Shell, BP, Chevron and Hess in regions that include not only the Gulf of Mexico, but also West Africa and South-East Asia.

In all, Zhang says he has worked on 17 tension-leg platforms, seven spars and four semi-submersible production platforms, a body of work that would be the envy of many of his peers. But Zhang is modest about what he has accomplished and says the reward is in the work itself.

“I just enjoy what I do, and do my best,” he says.

It is his international deep-water experience that is making Zhang a hot commodity in China. Numerous Chinese engineering houses have sought his advice, while the Chinese cabinet, or State Council, has enlisted him as an offshore engineering expert in the country’s prestigious Thousand Talents Programme, which hires foreign talent for domestic service.

Zhang also acts as a chief expert for some of China’s top offshore engineering institutions, including the Marine Design & Research Institute of China and he also helped establish China’s first deep-water research centre at Harbin Engineering University.

However, one of his main roles in China has been as an expert adviser to China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), a position he has been involved in for the past three years. Among its work in China, DMAR has carried out pre-front end engineering and design services for a pair of TLPs planned for CNOOC’s twin Liuhua oilfields in the South China Sea. He has also been asked by CNOOC to help train the oil company’s engineers and bring them up to speed on standard international practices.

Potential Zhang does not hide the challenges China faces in developing its deep-water potential. He highlights the Chinese oil and gas industry’s strength in shallow-water development but says it is about five years behind the rest of the world in its deep-water technology capabilities. He cautions that it would be “very risky to bring shallow-water experience and applications to deep water”.

China is keen to catch up with the rest of the industry’s state-of-the-art offshore technology, but must first become more familiar with international standards, Zhang says.

In an international company, a project manager usually has the final say in the decision-making process, whereas in China the project manager always has to respond to someone else questioning decisions.

“China wants an ‘apprenticeship’, to learn about foreign technology, but it follows its own management system,” he says.

However, being a part of that learning process fits in with Zhang’s long-term experience of seeking to impart knowledge through his work. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree from China’s Tongji University, his first position after graduating was as a teacher.

Later, his studies took him to Xian University of Architecture & Technology, where he earned a master’s degree in structural engineering.

Then, in 1988, he won a scholarship offered by the KC Wong Education Foundation in Hong Kong to pursue a PhD in offshore engineering at Berkeley University in the US, where he became the first person from China to win the Einstein Award, one of the highest honours a graduate student can win at the Californian university.

Zhang then moved into the oil industry and during his Houston-based career has worked in senior positions for local engineering houses. He says the first of his most challenging engineering projects was the Marlin TLP development in the US Gulf, which was built by Amoco in the late 1990s and is now operated by mineral giant Freeport-McMoran. The facility is tethered by tendons to the seabed in a depth of 972 metres in the Viosca Knoll area of the US Gulf.

Eventually, Zhang went out on his own and in 2011 he founded DMAR Engineering. The company is currently working on detailed design for the hull and mooring system for the Hess-operated Stampede TLP in the US Gulf, due online in 2018.

Zhang lives in Houston with his wife and has two children — twins, a boy and a girl — in college. In the rare moments he is able to find leisure time, he and his family like to go skiing and take cruises.

He travels internationally on a monthly basis, mostly to Asia. Travel has become simpler since he became a US passport holder, he says, and expects his next trip to come “anytime after OTC”.