Competition in the oil and gas licensing business, new oil processing technologies, plastic recycling projects, regional markets, NASA projects and more topics are covered in the interview with Gary Godwin, Senior Director, KBR Technology Solutions for BGS Talks show. Watch the interview, read the highlights and subscribe to BGS Talks YouTube channel for new episodes! 

We start with the primary oil and gas industry challenges. What are the main?

I think now the industry is in an environmental challenge. Public perception of the hydrocarbons industry; CO2 generation, greenhouse gases, environmental warming are significant aspects of what our industry faces now. We also have challenges on overall product demand. Demand for transportation fuels is relatively flat, but we do have an ever-increasing demand for petrochemicals. There are challenges of capacity increases, new units, increasing scalability.

KBR announced a business transformation at 2014. How many projects were launched for this transformation?

KBR has changed significantly since Stuart Brady, our CEO, arrived in 2014. We sold off a lot of our nuclear, power, construction businesses. We focused on three core areas with KBR Technology being one of them. Our traditional EPC business, in terms of our hydrocarbon services, continues to be an important area, but we're focusing it on upstream production, leveraging our knowledge in LNG to provide large-scale efficient operations. And one area that KBR really developed is our Government Services business. KBR now runs the NASA space station, particularly the Mission Control there. We're probably the 4th largest space company in the United States. We do a lot of high-tech development and defense systems in that space arena. I think KBR is now a solution provider rather than construction, a service support company that we historically were.

How much time does it take to commercialize technology?

It's a long time. Our typical refinery project, even with commercialized technology, takes 4-6 years to develop. In the commercialization of new technology the R&D takes at least 1-3 years, plus the catalysts development and the engineering design. Generally, it takes about 10 years to commercialize new technologies. Our K-SAAT technology, the Solid Acid Alkylation Technology that we commercialized in China, is now being licenced in the United States, which was very fast. It took us probably about 4-5 years to commercialize this technology. And, I think, in Asia and, specifically, in China, the growth and demand for these new technologies and appetite to take risks are higher than in the Western world.”

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