Principal Environmental ConsultantZoë Cairns BSc (Hons), MSc

Biography

Zoë has worked in the upstream oil and gas environmental field since the early 1990s. Zoë’s experience spans offshore and onshore oil and gas exploration and drilling, offshore platform and deep-water FPSO developments, subsea tie-backs, major pipeline studies and onshore oil and gas terminals. She has a proven track record in environmental support to project and operations (with strong innovative/lateral thinking abilities) and has recently participated as a subject matter expert in a high-level environmental risk assessment facilitated by Continua.

Zoë has extensive hands on experience of seeing projects from concept select, to FEED and EIA through to construction, installation, commissioning, first oil, on-going operations and through to decommissioning. This experience provides a solid basis for understanding management of environmental issues and delivery of practicable mitigation measures throughout a project life-cycle and applying lessons learned to new projects.

Career Highlights

• Involvement in over 60 EIAs and associated studies and permit applications for the upstream oil and gas industry, including major developments in challenging and environmental sensitive regions such as BP Clair and Total Laggan-Tormore.
• Involvement in a wide range of decommissioning studies from individual well abandonment to major field decommissioning programs.
• Providing coaching, compliance audit and on-going advice to US based FEED contractors for UK/Norway/North Sea developments (e.g. Mustang – BP Clair, SBM – Shell Fram FPSO, & Chevron Rosebank).
• Advising the oil industry in appropriate oil spill prevention and response planning to OSPAR and US EPA standards, with involvement in the development of over 50 oil spill contingency plans for companies including plans for BP, Conoco Phillips, Chevron, Total and Amerada Hess.
• Development and successful market launch of software designed to streamline permit applications, data collection and reporting for the UK upstream oil and gas industry.
• Global Director (Environment) at Xodus Group where she built up a team of over 60 environmental staff in offices across the UK as well as in Houston, Dubai, the Hague, Lagos and Perth.