What is your role at Xodus?

With a background in upstream oil and gas and energy transition and a Development Engineer with over 30 years of experience my role at Xodus is to provide technical rigour and integrated oversight. Supporting the energy industry to take complex early phase studies into confident, well-evidenced decisions. Alongside this I also support the strategic growth of the wider company.

How do you think consultants can help at this moment when the North Sea is facing commercial challenges?

Consultants can add most value in the North Sea today by improving the quality of investment decisions to support the right developments actually being delivered.

In a mature, commercially constrained basin, many project teams can start from a narrowly defined concept and focus on refining it, rather than stepping back to test whether it is the right starting point. Consultants can help reframe the decision, clarifying objectives and trade off criteria, challenging embedded assumptions, and ensuring the full value question is being addressed before narrowing in on delivery.

A critical contribution is expanding the range of alternatives considered. In the North Sea, focusing purely on IRR for the development in question can overlook more valuable system-wide outcomes. For example, a modest tie-back that fills ullage in an aging facility may extend asset life, delay cessation of production (CoP), and improve hub economics overall. These options can be missed without deliberately broadening the frame.

Consultants also help clients handle uncertainty more explicitly. By moving beyond single-point estimates and testing decisions across a range of scenarios, price, performance, or fiscal conditions, they enable more robust, resilient choices.

In addition, consultants bring their experience across from multiple operators and projects allowing them to identify proven approaches, common pitfalls, and realistic benchmarks, helping ground decisions in practical experience from across the basin.

In the current challenging environment of the North Sea, clients need to be comfortable they are choosing the best path forward, with a clear understanding of trade-offs and system value. Consultants play a key role in enabling that confidence.

What is the most interesting North Sea development project you have been involved in and why?

One of the most interesting North Sea projects I’ve worked on was supporting the Clair JV as Study Manager, focused on securing a reliable gas export route to underpin continued oil production.

The challenge was both immediate and strategic. In the short term, the study assessed contingency options to avoid production losses if the existing export route went offline, including low-probability “black swan” events. Longer term, it evaluated permanent export solutions ahead of the anticipated cessation of the current route. This required balancing technical feasibility, commercial impact, and system-wide dependencies across the asset.

What made the work particularly engaging was the number of stakeholders involved. With multiple JV partners, alignment was just as critical as the analysis itself. We applied Decision Quality and Decision Analysis principles throughout, structuring the problem clearly, exploring a broad set of alternatives, and quantifying uncertainty, but with a strong focus on the final element: commitment and ability to act. Without alignment across stakeholders, even the most robust recommendation would struggle to progress.

Despite being delivered over a rapid eight-week timeline, the study was able to bring clarity to a complex decision and support alignment on a preferred path forward. It was especially rewarding to see how a well-structured process helped unlock progress in what could otherwise have remained a stalled or fragmented discussion.

The project stood out because it combined technical, commercial, and organisational complexity and demonstrated how effective decision framing and stakeholder alignment is just as important as the solution itself.

What is the one piece of advice you would give North Sea Operators looking at a Development?

Invest time and resources in the early stages by applying Decision Quality principles to fully explore the frame and opportunity available to ensure that no value is left on the table, and then work actively to protect that value as the project progresses through later execution stages.