Meet Granherne’s Richard D’Souza

Richard D'Souza

Richard D’Souza’s career reads like a history of offshore energy development. Jeannie Stell gets his perspective.

Reading the resume of Richard D’Souza, current vice president of Granherne Global Operations, a KBR company, reads like one man’s journey through the history of offshore oil exploration and development during some of the most tumultuous and exhilarating times for the industry.

From the beginnings of offshore development, through the oil price collapses of 1973 and 1986, to the present-day struggles of low oil prices and the resultant boom and bust cycles, D’Souza has been there, done that, and chronicled its history in the many technical papers he has written.

He’s won the 1993 Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (SNAME) award, the ABS-Linnard Prize award for best technical paper, the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) best technical paper award in 2013, and this March, the SNAME lifetime achievement award for lifetime contributions. Recently, he shared some of his career highs and lows with OE.

“My start in the offshore industry was immediately following the 1973 Arab oil embargo when the price of oil quadrupled from US$3/bbl to nearly $12, creating the need to develop oil and gas in ever deeper waters,” D’Souza says.

In 1978, he joined Friede & Goldman Ltd. “They were one of the premiere designers of jackup rigs and semisubmersible drilling units. Yet, even then, all roads were leading to Houston. So I made the big move to Houston in 1978, where I’ve been ever since.”
Later, D’Souza began working for Pace Marine Consultants by designing innovative jackups, submersibles and semisubmersibles, but that business took a nosedive in 1986 following “the big crash” when Saudi Arabia decided to defend its market share and increase its oil exports, which launched a four-month, 67% plunge that left oil just above $10/bbl.

As a result, a few colleagues and D’Souza formed Omega Marine Engineering Systems, joined forces with an existing consulting firm, Omega, in 1985, and designed the first floating production unit for the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), a converted drilling semisubmersible named the Placid Green Canyon 29.

In 1991, Aker Engineering acquired Omega. “We helped Shell design some of their new generation tension-leg platforms, including the Auger and Mars platforms. In 1996, we won one of the marquee deepwater projects in the GOM — the Diana Hoover development, which was a major subsea tieback to a world class Spar in 4500ft of water — for ExxonMobil. We designed the hull, moorings, risers, the deck structure and all the subsea equipment.” The project set records for subsea horizontal drilling, deepwater pipelines, risers, mooring systems and the heaviest module lifts onto a floating surface offshore.

In 1999, D’Souza was courted and acquired by Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton. “I’ve been with KBR ever since. We were very successful in winning projects like ExxonMobil’s huge Kizomba A FEED in 2000, which was ExxonMobil’s first developments in Angola, and the Barracuda and Caratinga project in deepwater Brazil.”

Later, to help grow the company, D’Souza made a pitch David Lesar, the CEO of Halliburton, to acquire GVA Consulting, a Sweden-based designer of semisubmersible production systems, which it did in 2001. “With KBR, GVA and Granherne, we designed three major semisubmersible production systems in the GOM — Thunder Horse and Atlantis for BP, and the Jack/St. Malo semisubmersible for Chevron and were recently awarded BP’s Mad Dog Phase 2 semisubmersible production system. The Jack/St. Malo was installed in 2014 and is one of the largest production systems in the world.”

When asked what else he might like to accomplish before retirement, D’Souza says, “I love mentoring the younger engineers who are incredibly bright and eager to learn. The demographics in this industry has been skewed to the older end, and I think everyone in the industry has recognized that we need to bring younger engineers in. It’s up to the more-seasoned amongst us to start passing on knowledge to the next generation.”