From the Rig Floor to the Courtroom: 45 Years in Drilling with Steve Devereux

Steve Devereux has spent more than four decades working across the international oil and gas industry, and his career has taken him a long way from where it started.

Steve began as an aeronautical engineer before joining Shell in 1979 and learning drilling from the ground up. After training in Holland, he headed to Brunei where he worked his way through the drilling ranks before eventually building a consulting career that has taken him to more than 40 countries.

In this episode, I speak with Steve about how drilling careers were built back then, why getting genuine hands on experience mattered so much and whether some of that practical knowledge has been lost from the industry today.

We get into his time in the North Sea, well control, major accident risk, the increasing amount of decision making being moved away from the rig and some brilliant stories from a career spent working around the world.

Steve also explains his third career in dispute resolution, where he now works as an arbitrator and expert witness on complex industry disputes, and why decades of practical experience can become incredibly valuable when trying to establish what actually went wrong.

We also look towards the future.

Steve believes AI could represent a genuine step change for drilling, particularly through its ability to analyse huge amounts of data in real time, identify problems earlier and potentially improve well control and safety. But he also gives an important warning: we cannot allow people to blindly trust the technology without understanding the job themselves.

Towards the end, Steve shares some excellent advice for anyone starting an offshore career today, including why you should build a financial “war chest”, get as much practical experience as possible and never assume you will only have one career.

We finish with one of Steve’s proudest projects, an unusual well intervention offshore Tanzania that required a bit of engineering ingenuity and a very different approach to getting the job done.

A fascinating conversation with someone who has watched the drilling industry change enormously over more than 45 years.