Western Canada’s oil and gas industry is hot and getting hotter. That rising temperature is exacerbating the region’s skilled labour shortage.
But one of the industry’s major players has a unique way of retaining its priceless cache of engineers, designers and other technical staff.
Solaris Management Consultants Inc. designs gas processing plants, compression facilities, wellpads, metering stations and pipelines. It has approximately 320 employees, making it one of Surrey’s largest employers, and all its staff are based in the city.
On any given day, about 30 Solaris employees fly out from Vancouver to Calgary or Grande Prairie in northwest Alberta or to Fort St. John or Fort Nelson in northern British Columbia, said founder and president Avi Salh.
By keeping staff away from the competition, Salh said Solaris has a low staff turnover.
Salh founded Solaris in 1993, a year after moving from London, England, to be closer to his then-fiancée and now wife, Mindy Salh, who is the company’s vice-president of operations and finance.
Salh, a U.K. born chemical process engineer, built the company from an unknown newbie by initially offering his services free to small clients as it built up its network, experience and contacts.
Solaris is now a significant upstream oil and gas, engineering, procurement and construction management company. It services major integrated oil companies, but focuses more on natural gas than oil.
The company recently won a Surrey Board of Trade Business Excellence Award sponsored by KPMG LLP and completed a four-year engineering and procurement project in B.C. that had a capital value of $800 million.
“Our sweet spot is really projects in the $10 million to $200 million TIC [total installed costs],” said Salh. “At any time we have more than 150 projects ongoing continuously.”
As it takes on more and more challenges, Salh is hoping to grow the company and attract more business, and expects it to be a part of the major liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects that will come on stream in B.C. over the next seven to 10 years. It will focus on the upstream work – helping to get the gas to the LNG plants.
“If you look at the current potential opportunities in British Columbia with respect to natural gas, it’s quite incredible, as long as the B.C. government and the producers can amicably work together, the future is very, very good.”
According to the Canadian Energy Research Institute, global energy investment has been pouring into B.C., attracted to the Horn River and Montney shale gas plays in the province’s northeast.
The institute said in a recent report that approximately $21 billion in foreign investment has been spent in the area since 2007, with much of that coming from the world’s largest LNG importers, such as Japan and China. •
