The terms “game-changer” and “disruptor” get used often enough in the oil and gas industry to have been rendered almost meaningless.

Oliver Kassam, chief executive of Netherlands-based Airborne Oil & Gas, seems to be aware of this and mostly manages to avoid using them in a conversation.

But if any emerging oilfield technology makes such claims, Airborne’s bonded thermoplastic composite pipe (TCP) has a strong case.

Bonded TCP is composed of high-performance plastic material layered to form a solid pipe “wall” that resembles metal but weighs much less.

Airborne and its only significant competitor in the market, UK-based Magma Global, say TCP’s light weight and resistance to pressure and corrosive fluids and gases make it an attractive alternative to steel pipe in deep-water applications.

Newcomer

Kassam is a newcomer to the TCP business — having joined Airborne in June last year — but he is no stranger to oil and gas, having served more than 20 years in the industry.

Amsterdam is a return of sorts — Kassam was born in Brighton in the UK but the family moved early on to the Netherlands, where his mother grew up.

His father, a Briton of East African descent, was an oil and gas engineer who later became one of the first employees at Allseas.

Young Oliver often would tag along when the big semi-submersible pipelay vessels came to port.

“I was fascinated by these beasts,” Kassam says.

He returned to the UK for boarding school but opted not to attend university.

“At the age of 18, I really wanted to be an entrepreneur,” he recalls.

To build some savings, he spent the next three years onboard the type of vessels that awed him as a child, mostly working on long trunkline projects in the North Sea.

“It was hard work,” he says. “Sometimes three or four months at a time offshore. But it helped me understand what it means to work on the shop floor, so to speak.”

Wanting to advance in the industry, he returned to the south of England and his studies. Upon graduation from University of Brighton, he took a job in London with Halliburton, which in the mid-1990s was in growth mode and looking to expand its global reach.

Kassam enjoyed his time there but by 2000 began to get “itchy feet”, he says, and signed up with a group of former Halliburton execs who had formed an e-commerce oil and gas start-up called PetroCosm with backing from Chevron.

The venture lasted about a year before it was wiped out in the dot-com bust.

Nevertheless, Kassam describes the stint as “one of the best years of my career”. He was entrusted with a lot of responsibility and the job gave him the chance to relocate to Brazil.

South America suited him and he managed to secure a position with ABB Lummus Global when PetroCosm went belly up.

That gig ended two years later when ABB divested its oil and gas businesses.

“At that stage,” he says, “I fancied going back to the UK, and joined Stolt Offshore,” which became Acergy.

Acergy, which merged with Subsea 7 during Kassam’s eight years there, assigned him to a new management team in Asia.

“They really wanted to take the company from diving contractor to Tier 1 SURF contractor in Asia. And we were very successful,” he says. “We brought in a lot of money and really capitalised on the growth in deep-water pipelay in Asia.”

Kassam became Acergy’s managing director for Australia, based in Perth, where both his children were born. But the opportunity to return to Europe came in 2012 when former Acergy chief operating officer Bruno Chabas, newly installed as chief executive at SBM Offshore, offered him a job as president of sales and marketing.

“Bruno and I always worked well together,” he says.

“It was a step up for me and an opportunity, after being based in Australasia for eight years, to come back to Europe and be closer to my family, and slightly closer to my wife’s family in the US.”

Kassam joined the floater specialist at a time when it was recovering financially and repairing its reputation from heavy losses and compliance issues. He spent three years in sales and marketing and another three in Brazil as SBM’s regional president.

It was a challenging job as the company rebuilt its position in the region but by 2018 Kassam had again grown restless.

“I was looking for a new challenge, and it was time to leave Brazil,” he says.

The industry downturn had focused deep-water R&D on technology solutions to make projects viable at low break-even costs.

“I saw lot of focus but little breakthrough innovation,” he says.

Cascading effect

Airborne was an exception: “I felt that here was a very innovative product that really could have a major impact on our industry and that was exciting.”

He calls it “the cascading effect of TCP — if you can make the interconnection lighter, it has an effect on everything around it, as well as the installation".

Airborne has attracted a strong base of shareholders since it was founded in 2010, including Subsea 7 and fellow offshore services heavy-hitter Aker Solutions.

Airborne, which employs around 130, to date has focused mostly on jumper applications but recently announced an alliance with Brazil's Simeros Technologies to develop a deep-water riser — “the big prize” in TCP — and bring it to market by 2021, Kassam says.

He is happy to be living again in Holland and appreciates its “no-frills” aesthetic and “the directness of the people — they don’t pull any punches and it keeps you on your toes”.

And he is glad to be working with a small company making a product that could have an outsize impact.

Weekly

Kassam keeping innovations Airborne