Freek van Heerden
Consulting Partner, Director
With over 40 years experience, Freek has expertise in project & engineering management, front end engineering, project development and integration. He has worked extensively in gas/coal to liquids and chemicals.
ABOUT FREEK
Freek holds a master’s degree in chemical engineering and has more than 40 years’ experience. Freek has been involved in gas- and coal-to-liquids projects since 1998. He was the engineering manager on the Qatar and Nigeria GTL plants during the front-end loading phase. During this time, various other GTL and CTL studies were also undertaken in areas like the North Sea, Australia, Angola, Canada, USA, India, China and South Africa. Starting in 2006 he was the technical director responsible for the clean fuels EURO II implementation in Secunda as well as the later EURO IV Concept studies both for Secunda and the Natref refinery. The upgrading of the Temane / Pande Central processing facility, the ROMPCO pipeline and the expansion of the Secunda CTL plant to accommodate the additional natural gas was also concluded under his technical guidance.
Freek is co-author of a book on programme management.
Freek’s areas of expertise include:
- Multi-discipline engineering management
- Project management frameworks and models
- Project stage-gate processes
- Role of the owner project team
- New Business Development
- Project engineering quality management and project auditing
- Ensuring that strategic business objectives are met
- Integration of complex petrochemical megaprojects
- Project scope development, tracking and management
- Project risk management.
PUBLISHED INSIGHTS
The Importance of Engineering Management
In this article we address the areas where the engineering manager must take the lead for a project to be a business success Introduction The role of the engineering manager in projects was previously described using the ten knowledge areas of the Project Management...
Third Generation Modularisation
The development of modularisation in the process industry, from Generation 1 (G1) to Generation 3 (G3), was discussed in an earlier Insight Article. In this article we focus on the more salient and practical issues during the development of a modular approach and...
Introduction to Engineering Management
In this article the roles and responsibilities of an engineering manager and the interaction between the engineering manager and the project manager is explored. Introduction There is sometimes confusion regarding the role of, and need for, an engineering manager on a...
The project management triangle conundrum: Selecting between Quality, Cost, Time
It is often said that good and fast projects are expensive, good and cheap projects are slow, and cheap and fast projects are of poor quality. It is our opinion that this dogma leads to a totally inadequate setting of the project framework and does not provide the...
Value Chain Optimisation
The methodology followed during Value Chain Optimisation (VCO) is a rigorous and pro-active approach, across the full project value chain, during each development and design stage of a project. It ensures that only the required functionalities are incorporated into...