SembCorp Industries Deputy Chairman and CEO, Wong Kok Siew

Courtesy SembCorp Industries

The 640 km. pipeline extends south from the Natuna Sea delivering 325 million standard cu. ft. of natural gas daily to Singapore.

Courtesy SembCorp

A drydock on Jurong Island is used to refurbish and convert old ships, often for higher safety and environmental standards.

Photo Paul Douglass

SembCorp’s co-generation facility produces electricity and steam.

Courtesy SembCorp

For a major Singaporean company like SembCorp Industries, which operates in five key business sectors --utilities, engineering and construction, environmental engineering, logistics and marine-- the U.S.-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (FTA) will have an immediate, positive impact.

"An FTA with the U.S. opens up many areas that we in Singapore can go in and work with," says SembCorp Deputy Chairman and CEO, Wong Kok Siew.

Formed in 1998 after a merger between Singapore Technologies Industrial Corporation and Sembawang Industrial Corporation, SembCorp is one of Asia’s largest engineering service groups. The company operates one of the largest ship repair and conversion ports in the world and, among other things, built the first independent power plant in Singapore.

Highlighting one of numerous examples, Wong expects customers of the company’s marine operations to benefit directly from the FTA. "Essentially it is our American clientele who will benefit, not having to pay the additional tariff if they were to do their [ship repair] work over here in Singapore."

Through its SembCorp Waste Management subsidiary, the company is already the largest environmental service provider in Singapore. Today the company is looking for ways to minimize the need for incineration and increase recycling. By the end of 2002, SembCorp expects to open the first automated recycling center in Southeast Asia. The center will separate paper, glass, plastics and metals, starting with a capacity of 100 tons per day. Singapore produces approximately 4,000 tons of garbage per day. "Sustainable development is a major goal," says Wong.

Increasing security is another major focus. Wong says his company is also partnering with PSA Corporation and Savi Technology, a California-based company, to develop a high-tech tagging system that ensures the security of cargo containers bound for the U.S. The satellite-monitoring system is currently being tested using a technical platform developed for the U.S. Department of Defense.

"We think [the container security program] will be a fool-proof way to check containers," says Wong, who adds that SembCorp expects to be able eventually to implement the system worldwide.

Wong says that his company needs more foreign talent to expand. "We need to build brain power and creativity." While 35 percent of SembCorp employees are trained as engineers, he says, the company is always on the lookout for more talented engineers, architects and scientists.

Despite economic contraction in Southeast Asia in recent years, SembCorp has remained a highly profitable enterprise. In 2001, the company generated more than $90 million in profits, a 30 percent rise over its 2000 results.

For more information, see www.sembcorp.com.sg.

SembCorp Marine’s "boatique"
Vessels traverse both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to dock at SempCorp Marine’s shipyards, not to unload cargo, but, instead, to nurse their structural aches and pains.

Headquartered in Jurong Shipyard, Singapore’s oldest, SembCorp Marine is one of the world’s foremost shipbuilding, refurbishing, conversion, and offshore engineering companies. With a combined docking capacity of 1.9 million dead weight tons, SembMarine’s eight shipyards have one of the largest capacities worldwide.

A variety of docks and berths stretching over 2.7 kilometers of the Jurong Shipyard, one of SempCorps four facilities in Singapore, can accommodate four to five building and refurbishing projects at any one time, for all types of vessels. Each project can be expected to last six to 18 months, depending on the size of the project.

While Korea and Japan excel in mass-producing ships, SembCorp Marine is proud of its more specialized ship building “boatique.” “There are no assembly lines here,” explains Judy Han, SembCorp Marine vice president.

When a client calls with a specific repair need, SembCorp Marine specialists will gladly travel to offshore sites to repair and upgrade jack-up rigs, construct workover rigs, build and install offshore structures, and construct, repair, and upgrade semi-submersible structures. Refurbishing is often done to meet higher safety and environmental standards.

Ship conversion may seem like a lengthy process, but, in comparison to building anew, it is a much speedier way to fulfill clients’ needs. This environmentally friendly activity recycles and upgrades old ships that may have otherwise already surpassed their life expectancies. Clients often save as much as 12 months time over corresponding new build projects. Cost savings can be immense.

Highlights from the company’s numerous conversion projects include cargo vessel to livestock carrier or to container ship, as well as tanker to lightening vessel or to floating production storage and offloading (FPSO). FPSO projects are used worldwide at very deep offshore rig sites.

Shipping remains today a favorable mode of transport because ships have been shown to cause less environmental destruction than other transportation methods like motor vehicles or airplanes. Compared to other forms of transport, ships’ energy consumption is low, as is air and noise pollution.

SembCorp Marine has been expanding its facilities worldwide. Having weathered the global shipbuilding industry’s severe recessions in the latter half of the 1980s, SembCorp Marine now has eight shipyards in Singapore (Jurong, Sembawang, Jurong SML, and PPL Shipyards), China (Bohai Sembawang Shipyard and Dalian Cosco Marine), Brazil (Maua Jurong), and Indonesia (Karium Sembawang Shipyard).

For more information, see www.sembmarine.com.sg.

Efficient power generation
You may have heard of outsourcing data transcription or computing services, but utilities?

On Singapore’s Jurong Island, a largely man-made industrial island, home to over 70 local and multinational pharmaceutical, chemical, and petrochemical plants and refineries, power generation is frequently the responsibility of one company, SembCorp Utilities.

Ordinarily companies in these industries each construct and maintain their own individual utilities plants. But of the 70 on Jurong Island, 30 are customers of SembCorp Utilities and depend on the company’s reliable, centralized provision of utilities such as cooling or high-grade industrial water, electricity, and oil and gas to keep their operations going.

Were each of these tenants to individually generate or purchase their own utilities, they would not be benefiting from the economies of scale provided by SempCorp Utilities. With dependable, centralized utilities services, these 30 companies are able to focus instead on each of their core competencies, minimize start-up and maintenance costs, and optimize land use.

Branching out from a central, multi-utility facility, a complex network of pipelines traverses the island, each line color coded to indicate the contents that flow within. The resulting pipeline network delivers everything from steam to de-mineralized water and natural gas across more than a dozen hectares.

For companies that depend on natural gas for their critical operations, SembCorp Gas (SembGas), a SembCorp Utilities division, operates a 640-kilometer secure, sub-sea natural gas pipeline that extends from Indonesia. Via pipeline, SembGas imports 325 million standard cubic feet of natural gas daily, extracted directly from multiple locations in Indonesia’s West Natuna Sea.

According to SembCorp CEO Wong, this means $700 million per year flowing from Singapore to its neighbor Indonesia. Distribution throughout the Jurong Island complex enables applications such as power generation, chemical feedstock extraction, and heating and cooling.

One beneficiary of the natural gas receiving terminal is SembCorp Cogen (SembCogen), the first independent power plant in Singapore, operational since September 2001.

In typical power plants, electricity is the only output; valuable heat generated in the process is "wasted and lost to the environment."

Using technology originally developed by General Electric, SembCogen burns natural gas and utilizes an "advanced combined-cycle gas turbine technology" to produce both electrical power and steam while reducing dangerous sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions.

Co-generation saves fuel because the ordinarily wasted heat is "harnessed for use." The extracted steam is, in turn, used to supply steam consumers. The resulting efficiencies often triple, or even quadruple, those resulting from conventional power generation.

The 815-megawatt combined cycle cogeneration plant produces up to 650 megawatts of electricity and 550 tons of steam per hour.

In response to increasing demand, SembUtilities plans to expand the island’s facilities through 2004. The company will also begin to supply electricity to domestic commercial customers once Singapore’s electricity market is fully liberalized in 2003-2004. Regional power generation capacity has grown considerably as SembCorp entered Vietnam and China in 2001.

To ensure that the products and services it provides remain on the leading-edge, SembCorp Utilities has linked with Nanyang Technological University. This alliance will dedicate focused human capital and technology on increasing cost-effectiveness and efficiency. New membrane-based water purification technology, for example, enables wastewater to be converted into high-grade industrial water.

SembCorp Utilities, a subsidiary of SembCorp Industries, comprises seven divisions including centralized utilities, gas, power generation, power supply, water, chemical feedstock, oil and gas.

For more information, see www.sembutilities.com.sg.