Hi everyone,

Another week has flown by here in Houston, and again it was a phenomenal experience.  Work wise, it was a challenging week for many reasons, but for one more so than others. Yes, my fellow Houstonian interns, I’m talking about the gas. This morning the main gas supply line for our area was shut down for “structural integrity testing” for between four and six days. Now you might be thinking, wait Scott, don’t gas turbines consume quite a bit of compressed natural gas, and you’d be right. They do, in fact on average for Wood Group's customers, approx 800 cubic feet per minute. So I spent the better part of last week attempting to track down roughly half a million cubic feet of compressed natural gas. You may again be thinking, in an area such as Houston which is so heavily in the oil and gas industry, that shouldn’t be much of a problem... wrong! The main energy supplier for the area had all of their equipment tied up in a small town in west Texas, so there seemed to be no one in the Houston area who could support our needs during the outage. Anyway, to cut a long story short (kind of), we eventually found a supplier in Tampa, Florida who could meet our rather steep requirements. This leads me on to what I feel I have learned from this working week. Although the engineers had found the gas supply which the company required in order to meet customer testing demands, it was at an incredibly large expense. Therefore the final decision didn’t rest in the hands of the engineers, but with the more business minded employees across the road. I believe this week I’ve been able to gain an incredible insight into this give and take between the engineers and business people who work within the same organisation. This can be very frustrating at times, due to the incredibly different mind-set of the two groups of employees. However, from it, I have hugely improved my project planning skills as well as developed my understanding of how the business side of what is in essence an engineering firm operates. I have also been able to further my inter-personal skills, and feel that I will now be able to deal with a situation such as this, and business men and women generally, much better in the future. Engineering rant over!

Towards the end of the week I also had the chance to meet Derek Blackwood. Derek is one or our GlobalScots and President of Production Facilities for Wood Group in MEANAC, John explained the acronym in his blog. The five other interns and I met Derek, John Lee and Maribel for lunch last Friday. It was nice to finally meet him and have a short chat, as he’s normally out of country... I regret not having the steak.

Socially, this week has again been busy.  We even got the chance to visit our first cowboy bar which was pretty surreal. I can conclude from this that dancing is definitely not my game! At the weekend we took the two and a half hour road trip up to Austin, which was an amazing experience. Austin, for those of you who don’t know, is Texas’ state capital, and a massive university town. Home to the University of Texas, which I’m told has approximately 100000 students (reference UT grad Tommy Browder). Whilst there we visited; the State Capitol building, the University Campus and Austin’s famous 6^th Street. I was also particularly impressed with the Longhorns Football Stadium, which after expansion is completed soon, will boast a capacity which puts the Nou Camp to shame. Thanks again Tommy. It was an amazing city, and there’s even talk of going back towards the end of our internships.

Oh yeah, almost forgot to explain the title, it’s an advertising reference which I’m sure most of you will be familiar with. That’s right, we found Irn-Bru in Houston. In fact there’s a whole British section in our local supermarket. Needless to say we have been stocking up on Heinz Baked beans and “The Bru” (Disclaimer – other brands of baked beans are available. However, not Irn-Bru; it’s the one and only!)

Anyway, I’ll leave it there for this week. Hopefully the engineering chat wasn’t too painful. I’m trying to tone it down as my fellow interns are already sick of it! Bye for now.

Scott.