With its innovative solutions and its uniquely holistic approach, 3t Energy Group is transforming routine training for millions of oil and gas and industrial staff every year into genuinely beneficial and productive experiences. Through the use of cutting-edge technology, the company provides bespoke, blended training solutions for a diverse array of customers. Richard Hagan met with Gavin Taylor, Vice President of Global Sales, to find out how the company trains over 130,000 people a year.
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BlueWater, 3t Energy Group consists of four companies that have come together as a result of a series of strategic acquisitions. The group, which today consists of Drilling Systems, AIS Survivex, 3t Transform and the recently acquired Utilities Construction Training (UCT), offers a variety of training facilities, workforce management solutions and software, and digital learning platforms to a wide spectrum of clients that include the oil and gas industry, renewables, utilities and power as well as industrial companies such as manufacturers and corporates.
Footprint and facilities
3t Energy Group enjoys a truly global reach: in the UK, the company boasts a network of world-class training facilities in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle and
London, as well as various office and harbourside locations. Its latest training facility in Teeside is due to open imminently, adding to a growing UK base.
Additionally, the company has sales offices in Houston, Dubai and Saudi Arabia. It also has training centres created through strategic joint ventures, located i n Guyana in South America and one in Qatar. “We’re the first OPITO approved training centre to set up in Guyana; it’s an important, emerging oil and gas region and we are delighted to be operating there,” said Gavin Taylor, Vice President of Global Sales
Altogether, 3t Energy Group employs 400 staff across all its locations. This complement of staff is certainly kept busy thanks to the group’s very high rate of training activities. “Our traditional training operations are the real engine of our
organisation,” he said. “On any given day we have 500 people training in our centres, and in total, we train around 130,000 people per year. We’re recognised as having the best and largest training centres in the UK.”
That recognition comes partly in the form of accreditations. The Group’s AIS Survivex is a star performer in this regard, boasting a full 47 individual accreditations from OPITO – far more than any single competitor worldwide. The group’s training centre in Newcastle also has the distinction of issuing the most wind industry GWO certificates from a single site loca tion: more than any other training site in the world.
History and development
3t Energy Group began taking shape in 2015 with BlueWater’s acquisition of Drilling Systems, the world number one
for advanced drilling simulators and a globally renowned name in the industry, specialising in the designing, manufacturing and selling of hands-on training simulators for drilling operations.
“It’s like an aircraft simulator but for drilling,” Gavin explained. “Drilling contractors, operators and training schools use these simulators to train crews on how to drill a well, for example.”
In 2017, BlueWater acquired AIS Training, the largest training provider for the energy sector-based in North Shields just outside of Newcastle, merging with Drilling Systems to create 3t Energy Group.
Survivex, based in Aberdeen, was the next to be brought into the fold in 2018, substantially increasing the group’s footprint and infrastructure in the United Kingdom. Petrofac training’s UK in-person training business was subsequently
acquired in 2021, followed by UCT at the end of 2022.
The Group has enjoyed sustained and substantial growth. “We’ve grown to be the largest Energy Sector training provider in the UK, and by a large margin,” said Gavin. “We’re now much bigger than any competitors locally and we're becoming a global powerhouse for training, growing our footprint and offering, and extending our expertise worldwide. We’re a very fastgrowth organisation and it’s an exciting time to be part of 3t.”
Flexible high-tech training
Today, 3t Energy Group is a world-leading provider of training and competency services to the global energy and industrial sectors, and it prides itself on its ability to transform training with the use of tech nology. “We support our clients to deliver safer, smarter and more efficient people,” Gavin noted.
3t Energy Group’s core markets are those with safety-critical operations, where the training and competency of the workforce in those environments is critical to their ability to operate safely and efficiently. “We serve hazardous markets like oil and gas, wind power, utilities, and power generation, as well as the nuclear sector,” he said, “but we serve a much wider customer base too - anywhere where there’s a need to support the development of learning for the customer’s needs, we can support with high-impact solutions.”
The perfect blend
3t Energy Group especially prides itself on what it calls its blended training solutions. Broadly speaking, these are bespoke training services developed to meet a client’s specific needs and challenges in any given project.
“Learning has evolved a lot over the years and today, people learn very differently to how they did even just 20 or 30 years ago,” Gavin explained. “In the past, the material was delivered via books and lectures, but the way that we as learners consume knowledge and information today has rapidly changed. Blended solutions, therefore, allow us to incorporate different learning styles across a single project, to address the different needs of the learners and significantly boost learning outcomes.”
For its blended training solutions, 3t Energy Group begins by reviewing the content that must be delivered and the specific demographics of the audience that must be trained. The company then leverages all of the capabilities, assets and expertise available across its group to deliver a bespoke, holistic, blended solution to the customer.
“Blended solutions leverage the power of technology, including digital learning, physical simulations and software,” said Gavin. “All of that is augmented by different learning styles in order to meet the diverse needs of the learning personnel by incorporating different training methods that suit different people. This approach has been shown to help immensely with knowledge retention in particular.”
For example, the group recently delivered (and won) a digital innovation award for a bespoke training programme for bp as they onboarded Operations and Maintenance technicians for the Greater Tortue Ahmeyim project. For this major infrastructure project, incorporating an FPSO, FLNG and Offshore Hub, bp needed 3t to create a programme to onboard their workforces to the multi-billion-dollar producing asset off the coast of Mauritania and Senegal.
“We created an exact digital twin replica of bp’s asset and created a programme for these workforces to train safety-critical procedures via VR headsets hosted in our training facilities,” noted Gavin.
This cutting-edge programme yielded significant results for bp, including an improvement to learning and competency rates, time saved on training get ting teams up to speed before the asset was even complete, plus cost and carbon footprint reduction from reduced travel for training This style of blended learning also provides tangible boosts to learning outcomes including greater confidence in the field, improved team engagement and, importantly, greater employee safety.
Concluding, Gavin shared the group’s plans for the future: “We want to continue growing, while giving our clients more solutions that serve them even better. We’ll further increase our geographical density with more infrastructure around the world , and we want to get into other industries where we know we can make a significant impact with what we do.”
