Fairwinds International

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Fairwinds International is a Louisiana-based ‘fullservice company specializing in engineering, project management, consulting, and inspection services to the offshore and onshore oil and gas industry for all aspects of the assigned project.’

Bill Napier, Fairwinds’ founding President and CEO, has spent 15 years building the company from its inception in 1994, into the “one-stop shop” it is today.

“I was a one-man consultancy working in somebody else’s office until about eight years ago when some of my customers told me to get out of my office at my house which we did. By the grace of God many good things have happened and our company has continued to grow” he says. “We market ourselves primarily to the oil and gas companies that do not have enough staff to do a project or is just simply overloaded. We will go and be their engineering and construction management department on an as-needs basis. So what we offer is really a one stop shop where we’ll do the purchasing, the permitting, engineering (all disciplines), construction project management, commissioning and inspection. Primarily what we do is oil and gas structures, pipelines, and facilities.”

Fairwinds International is also startlingly diverse. In fact, the night before Napier sat down with IRJ, the company completed a very unique and exciting project.

Platform Removal in the Gulf of Mexico
“Last night we just came off a really great job” Napier enthuses.

Of course we simply had to hear more about it. “In the U.S Gulf of Mexico right now, the removal of old platforms is turning into a big part of the market for everybody. About 25 years ago one of our customers took an old drilling rig, put it in 75 feet of water and turned it into a production facility. Due to storm damage it had to be removed but the problem with it was that nothing worked on it anymore from a jacking point of view, it could not float, or from any point of view. We had to redo the jacking system, put it on a barge and bring it to shore. It’s just about to dock right now actually. What makes it much more difficult is that we had to put the biggest barge we could fit underneath the drilling rig to get it out. The weight was pushing the limit of the barge. Another problem was that most of the weight was on one side which created all sorts of issues” he says.

“Then the other issue we uncovered a couple of days ago was that it weighed way more than the documentation said and that caused a tremendous amount of problems due to the transportation barge size. But we were very fortunate with the team of people working on this and we got together to figure out what to do, adjusted our program accordingly – almost daily depending on when we found out new information – and we succeeded. We ended up cutting off 300 tons from the vessel to make it light enough to get on the barge. This was done in 48 hours. Our big concern was that there were three oncoming tropical storms. Had they hit our site we would have had a disaster. The customer is thrilled, the marine surveyor is thrilled and some very dramatic pictures are coming out of this.”

Napier explains that while this project is “a very different sort of job, very unique and not something that every company does” it is also “a problem that as the oil and gas field gets older, people will be facing more and more.” This forward-thinking outlook is central to the diverse, flexible and all-round service that Fairwinds International offers today.

Offering every “piece of the pie”
Napier explains that while this project makes for exciting reading, it is not typical of the “bread and butter work” that Fairwinds International tends to do. “Normally a lot of what we do comes after a customer goes and drills a well. We do what I call field development studies. We’ll tell them their production options, for example whether to take it to another platform or build their own. We tell them what their capital expenses, operating expenses, and transportation costs of the product will be. We look at the options for the distribution pipelines for the oil and gas along with the associated costs. These are really our bread and butter projects” he says.

However common or uncommon a project may be, Fairwinds still pip many of their competitors to the post by offering the full-package to their customers. “Most of our competitors only want us to provide a part of the pie, for example they only want to be an engineering company or they are only want to be a project management company. The advantage that we bring is that we’re capable of taking the entire project on which is fabulous for a client because they only have one company that they need to interface with” Napier explains.

“We may partner with other companies on a project basis and we partner well with others. That is the attraction that the oil and gas companies have to us.”

The future of Fairwinds International
Napier explains that the company is thriving and continues to offer this unbeatable comprehensive service to their clients, but they will happily take on parts of projects large or small too.

“We’re doing work for a major oil and gas company right now but all they want is help on a certain part of the project whereas the independent oil and gas companies want the entire project done by somebody else and that’s our advantage. We have on our staff a lot of people from the oil and gas industry who understand the full range of oil and gas projects; who understand drilling, who understand reservoir engineering etc. so the value-added that we bring to the client is as a group of people with strong industry experience throughout the entire cycle of the projec and that’s what they like about us” he says.

“We’re a diverse, willing company and we’re big enough to do any project that is presented to us but we’re still small enough that each customer and project is important to us.” Fairwinds has been named to the INC 5000 list for the fastest growing private U.S. firms for three consecutive years, 2007-2009.

At Fairwinds International the results speak for themselves. This focused, adaptable, diverse and experienced company is set to continue providing excellent service in everything they do. Their mission “to be the standard of excellence against which all others shall be compared” looks well within their reach.