John Crane's new centre

John Crane UK Ltd has taken support for its North Sea sector customers to an entirely new level with the official opening of its extended and improved Oil and Gas Support Unit in Aberdeen. The new facility will enable John Crane to provide customers with a greater range of advanced support services, faster response times and new training facilities, reflecting its commitment to customers in the Aberdeen and North Sea region.

The Unit will house full sales and service facilities for both mechanical seals and gas seals. Colin Ure, General Manager of John Crane UK, said: “The facilities we had previously were already able to deliver in-depth support. However our new facility enables us to tailor our activities more closely to meet the changing needs of our oil and gas customers. Our aim is to become the automatic provider of choice for North Sea operators, and the new facility will certainly help us move towards that aim.”

Purpose-built training facilities have also been created. “Although the focus will be on the type of training that is specifically tailored to the needs of North Sea operators, the new facilities will make the full range of John Crane training courses available to all our customers,” Ure added.

The building will also house John Crane’s new Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) service team. Designed to help customers achieve greater reliability, improved uptime and lower maintenance costs, the CBM service centers on a series of data capture, transmission and analysis operations. These allow rotating and other process equipment to be continuously monitored so that detailed operating and performance data can be gathered. This can then be used to tailor preventative maintenance schedules to individual items of process or plant, thus dramatically improving the detection of developing faults and so increasing uptime.   
“In addition to our engineered sealing systems we also offer a wide portfolio of related products such as seal support systems, power transmission couplings, advanced hydrodynamic bearings and associated filtration technology,” Ure added. “This means that the new Aberdeen facility will provide customers in the region with access to a wealth of products, technical and support services that have numerous applications in the oil and gas sector.”

Along with the John Crane facility in Stavanger, Norway, the Aberdeen Unit will also continue to deliver a dedicated North Sea 24/7 emergency response service.