ILF Consulting Engineers
A leading consultant
ILF Consulting Engineers has a proven track record in delivering comprehensive design and construction solutions across a broad selection of market sectors and geographical regions.
The company was founded during the late 1960s and since it was last featured in European Oil and Gas Magazine (EOG) during January 2013 it has continued to develop the highly regarded and successful solutions that it supplies to its clients.
Today it is a group of international and independent engineering companies with more than 30 branches and support offices throughout Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and North America. These are co-ordinated from its main offices in Munich, Germany and the Austrian city of Innsbruck. All ILF companies work within an Integrated Management System (IMS), which is certified according to ISO 9001, 14001 as well as OHSAS 18001. Presently ILF employs a combined workforce of over 1800 people serving an international client base. Broadly speaking, ILF organises its business into four areas made up of oil and gas, water and environment, energy and climate protection, and transport and structures.
The company’s dedicated business areas are further sub-divided into smaller business units that offer targeted services to clients in specific areas. Within the oil and gas market for example, it manages pipeline systems, underground storage facilities, tank farms and terminals, refineries and petrochemical plants as well as a newly established upstream division. The upstream activities undertaken by ILF were previously managed by the director of process engineering, Rolf Szczepanek, who was interviewed during the company’s last appearance in EOG, and are now overseen by Helge Hoeft as director of upstream. Commenting on the decision to establish the new business unit Helge says: “By setting up the new upstream business unit we deliver a clear message to the market that we are a serious player in upstream, rather than treating it as a side business to the company’s gas storage and pipeline services. The success of the recent three years has proved that we are on the right track.”
Along with a significant upstream business growth ILF delivered a number of world-scale projects including the Samotlor, the sixth largest oil field in the world, brownfield redevelopment conceptual design to optimise its OPEX base as well as the Halfaya Phase 1 oil field development in Iraq, for which ILF successfully executed project management consultancy (PMC) services, are part of this major achievement.
As well as moving to further define its position within the upstream market sector, ILF has transitioned into new geographic areas with the opening of ILF Calgary, Canada, and ILF Amman, Jordan. The contrast between the two new ventures is representative of the diverse regional and technical base that ILF serves, which allows the company to develop bespoke project solutions and to constantly develop its sizeable knowledge base. “If you follow the industry news you can see that there are some engineering challenges with the region’s pipeline systems,” Helge elaborates. “We see major potential for ILF to gain a strong footprint in Canada and to extend our business in the Middle East. The projects in Jordan are currently dealing with significant oil and LPG storage facilities. These are again PMC services that have helped ILF grow during the past year.”
Although ILF owes at lot of its early success and development to the pipeline area of its business, today it has incorporated all of the knowhow accrued by its various divisions in all business areas to offer wide ranging cross-business solutions. “On the technology side we have made major progress on solar power, specifically in photovoltaics (PV) and concentrated solar power (CSP),” Helge explains. “We have had major breakthroughs in these and have seen considerable work in Dubai, where we have executed one of the Middle East’s biggest PV power plants as owners’ engineer. This is also an important step for upstream, as often operations are in remote locations and there is a need to provide well sides with a cost effective power supply. This is a good cross-business development in a number of ways.”
Over the course of its history ILF has successfully managed contracts for a host of companies within the oil and gas market, including some of the sector’s biggest operators such as ADCO, ExxonMobil, Gazprom, OMV, PetroChina, Sinopec, TNK-BP and Wintershall, as well as marginal field operators around the world.
When it comes to defining its position within the wide range of projects that it tenders, Helge identifies three main areas that mark ILF Consulting Engineers’ most prominent strengths: “One of the most important advantages that we have is that we are still privately owned. It makes us a fully independent engineering company without contractual ties with any contractor, equipment or technology supplier. This gives us the opportunity to tailor optimised project solutions to our clients’ needs, ranging from asset operators to EPC contractors.
“The second strength that we have is our one-stop-shop strategy that allows ILF to deliver complex interdisciplinary industrial and infrastructure projects. ILF’s recent focus on supply power technologies, i.e. solar power and thermal power plants, strengthens the upstream business by selling cross business area capabilities to deliver projects in remote areas as well as enhanced oil recovery (EOR) brownfield developments. Last but not least, ILF is continuously striving for market leadership through quality. Combining our key strength with our high HSE standards forms the basis for ILF’s top priority to establish long-term business relations with our clients.”
ILF Consulting Engineers
Services: Project management, design and construction, and commissioning consultancy