Norman J. Smith

Norman Smith holds degrees from Oxford University (M.A.), the City University (M. Phil.) and Aberdeen University (Ph.D.). He has also participated in management development programmes at Harvard and INSEAD/CEDEP. He is a Fellow of the Energy Institute and of the Society of Business Economists. His career began in engineering manufacture where he first became involved with the offshore oil and gas industry. After a spell in merchant banking, he was seconded to the Department of Energy. On his return to the private sector, he co-founded and managed an energy consulting company and served as director of eight private companies in the oil and gas industry, becoming chairman of three. After retirement, he researched and authored an extensive study of the British supply chain supporting exploration and production activities in the North Sea: The Sea of Lost Opportunity: North Sea Oil and Gas, British Industry and the Offshore Supplies Office, published by Elsevier, as well as a number of journal articles and research papers.

His early business career gave him experience of market and financial analysis, marketing, corporate finance and corporate strategy – a good background for a subsequent career in the offshore oil and gas industry. That began in the mid-1960s when he identified the newly arrived North Sea oil and gas business as an opportunity area for his then employer, the Vickers Group, work which helped set in train the events leading to the foundation of the UK’s first significant subsea services company, Vickers Oceanics.

By the time this had come about, he was in the City, helping to set up and fund exploration consortia and E & P companies, fabricators and consulting companies while encountering oil field financings for the first time. Next came a three-year secondment to the UK Department of Energy’s Offshore Supplies Office (OSO) where he became Director General, responsible, among other things, for running the world’s first formal ‘local content’ policy. Under his watch, the UK content of expenditure on the United Kingdom Continental Shelf passed the target of 70% for the first time. This job was inevitably political and the politics were international as well as domestic.

Then it was back to the private sector, spending a couple of years as chairman of British Underwater Engineering Ltd where the state (through the National Enterprise Board) was the controlling shareholder. Here the politics were too hot to handle and he left several years before the company foundered.

Thereafter he devoted his energies to developing Smith Rea Energy Associates Ltd (SREA) and its affiliated companies into what arguably became in the 1980s and 1990s Europe’s premier techno-economic consultant for the offshore oil and gas industry. Its international clientele included oil and gas companies from the largest to the very small, contractors and service companies of all sizes, financial institutions and government agencies from the UK, the USA, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway and Australia as well as the European Union. It had a flourishing publications business, including both the ‘Offshore Business’ and ‘Offshore Commentary’ series, an annual review of the floating production market and one-offs such as those relating to multi-phase flow and subsea separation and to the potential of the West of Shetlands, often working with specialist partners.

The Smith Rea business was sold in 1998 but Norman Smith continued to work in various capacities. Though now formally retired, he continues to write and would always consider a speaking engagement or even a tantalisingly interesting piece of advisory work. His website is http://normanjsmith.wordpress.com/