Daniel Cumming, Performance and Growth Manager for our offshore oil and gas assets in the Central North Sea, tells us about his career journey and what a day in the life of his role entails…
I started my career working offshore as an onboard seismic acquisition and processing geophysicist. This provided a great opportunity to travel and see new countries and set the tone for the international career path I have followed since.
I then moved back onshore and worked for around nine years in a variety of roles within exploration, firstly for a small start-up company in Norway, based in Bergen, and latterly for Maersk Oil in Aberdeen.
I was fortunate to work on a number of different basins and geological settings and it was during my time in Aberdeen that I first began working in the Central North Sea (CNS), High Pressure, High Temperature (HPHT) domain – highly relevant as the assets we manage today in the CNS (Culzean and Elgin/Franklin) are both HPHT fields.
I moved into oil and gas field development in 2015, relocating to Kazakhstan where I was the Head of Geoscience and latterly Head of Reservoir Management for an onshore oil field development project called Dunga. I then took a similar role in Esbjerg, Denmark, to work on the Gorm and Tyra offshore assets. This was another great experience, gaining exposure to tight reservoir (chalk) management and long offset horizontal drilling methods.
With Maersk Oil and TotalEnergies now merged by this point, my next role was based in Paris at TotalEnergies HQ as a Development Study Lead, dedicated to our Deep Offshore Global Portfolio. I was fortunate to work on a number of exciting projects in Brazil, Angola and Mauritania over that period.
Now my family and I are back home in Scotland for the first time in almost 10 years, and after all the fantastic experiences abroad, we’re looking forward to embracing our new, but familiar environment.
Looking back on your career, what advice would you share?
If I could share any reflections, I think it would be that I’ve never tried to look too far ahead in my career journey. It’s always been important to me to ensure I deliver well in my current role. If I can do that, I know new opportunities will present themselves at TotalEnergies in the future.
A day in the life of Daniel
I spend the first 30 minutes of my day reviewing the day or week ahead. It’s easy to get caught up in an endless cycle of meetings, so leaving time to plan, prioritise and communicate is important to ensure that my own focus, as well as the team’s, is applied in the right areas.
The Performance and Growth team for the Central North Sea has a broad remit. We cover cost performance (budget management), long term strategic planning for our offshore assets and infrastructure, development study maturation, joint venture management, contract performance and continuous improvement.
This demands strong engagement with the other teams involved in our Central North Sea operations, such as Field Operations, Health Safety and Environment (HSE), Drilling and Geoscience, as well as our Technical Service, Strategy and Legal teams in our day-to-day activities.
I’m lucky to work alongside a great group of people within our Central North Sea operations. There is a real spirit of collaboration between the different asset teams (supporting the Culzean and Elgin/Franklin platforms). Within the Performance and Growth team, we have a lot of experienced individuals who can work autonomously, which is a real privilege and certainly makes my life easier as a manager!
I have to say the role is certainly a varied one. We could be hosting joint venture partners for committee meetings one day, reviewing the latest budget closure forecast the next, or preparing and presenting final investment decision dossiers to management another day. That’s the thing I love the most about the role: each day brings new challenges and opportunities! It involves a lot of communication between different interfaces in the Central North Sea team (and beyond), which I really enjoy.