President McAleese cites ESBI as example in Romania

ESBI recently announced the award of a contract worth approximately €7million working as client engineer for Petrom, a large Romanian oil company that is a subsidiary of the Austrian oil giant OMV.

Specifically, ESBI Engineering and Facility Management (ESBIe-fm), an ESBI business line, will provide engineering services for a 800MW combined-cycle power plant being built beside the Petrom Refinery at Brazi, near Bucharest. The construction and commissioning phases will run until 2011.

During a recent state visit by President McAleese to Bucharest, a dinner was hosted for Irish and Romanian business leaders. Petrom senior managers, Lacarmiora Diaconu, Director of Petrom's Power Business Division, and Horia Bogdan, Project Manager for the Petrom Power Project, were guests of ESBIe-fm at the function.

In her speech at the event, President McAleese highlighted how trade had grown significantly between Ireland and Romania over the last five years and was worth in the order of €250 million in 2007. The President also mentioned the achievements of companies like ESBI in winning complex engineering work, with OMV-Petrom.

The Petrom project is now progressing with Derek Green as Project Manager, supported by his ESBIe-fm team of: Sylvester Byrne, Hugh Cunningham, John Findlater and Joe Nolan. A number of design review meetings have already been held with the consortium partners, GE and Metka.ESBI have been involved in Romania for several years. A branch office was opened in 2004, with Stuart Dawson as its manager until early this year. Projects undertaken include a transmission infrastructure rehabilitation programme on behalf of Transelectrica the National Grid Company.

ESBIe-fm is also acting as client engineer on a project located in Hai Phong, Vietnam. This contract was awarded to a partnership of ESBI and ISPE, a local Romanian engineering company. A team of Irish and Romanian staff is already working on site on the Hai Phong Project.