Strategic Planning Engineer

Air Liquide Large Industries provides our customers with industrial gas and energy solutions that are vital to their own industrial production. We own and operate over 2,000 miles of industrial gas pipelines in the U.S. supplying mainly oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and syngas in large quantities from multiple production sources to major customers in the chemicals, petrochemicals, refining and steel industries. Our pipeline operations and industrial gas production facilities are closely monitored 24/7 within our leading-edge operations control center located in Houston, Texas. Our operations control group monitors over 89,000 data points and assists with product supply and coordination. We are constantly optimizing our supply network to provide high reliability and energy efficiencies allowing Air Liquide to adjust supply needs more quickly and effectively enabling growth to our customers.

• Is a Subject Matter Expert for steady state and transient hydraulic analysis in the US and Canada, for all existing pipeline operation and future investments. The Engineer will be responsible for the initiation, development, and completion of hydraulic assurance studies and translating and communicating the results, risks, and recommendations surrounding supply feasibility and efficiency indications to the business.

• Is responsible for the accurate and timely delivery of gas supply expectations and risks of new sales and investments to the business and internal customers, including Commercial, Business Development, Construction Implementation, other Project Management teams, Pipeline Construction, and Engineering & Construction [E&C].

Strategic Planning & Projects

• Develops, owns, and advocates the customer delivery capabilities and hydraulics of pipeline investment strategies of Air Liquide.

• Identifies strategic/hydraulic issues and trends that may provide opportunities or introduce risk for Air Liquide, including those related to new customer growth, organic customer growth, and changes to asset capabilities.

• Interfaces with business development and commercial managers to understand existing customer requirements, potential new contract requirements, and potential new assets, with a focus on customer delivery capability, risk of existing and future pipeline operation, and critical input to indicative pricing for new business.

• Ensures collaboration with capital investment and project management teams to create detailed solutions for new pipeline customers and assets, with a focus on creating an accurate reflection of asset performance in relation to the pipeline. Acts as a key stakeholder in project review meetings ensuring optional implementation requirements are clearly captured in project scope and communicating impact of any descoped aspects.

• Potential for accountability of all modeling, supply perspective, and communication provided for all new investment and sales projects by the Strategic Planning team, including direct management of team members.

• Potential to drive an initiative to develop a mechanism and process to estimate and translate long-term efficiency expectations and implications created by new projects.

Hydraulic modeling

• Develops and maintains a deep knowledge of the pipelines and hydraulics of specifically the large US networks. Develops and manages successful relationships with both pipeline construction and the End-to-End [E2E] Planning Team as a resource.

• Develops and maintains a deep knowledge of our hydraulic tools as well as general tool trends available on the market. Develops and manages a successful relationship with our tool manufacturer for support.

• Develops, owns, maintains, and documents the philosophy for Air Liquide hydraulic modeling and general principles and best practices to be incorporated by all modeling.

• Scopes all modeling needs for solution development, interpretation, and validation, based on both initial requirements and findings that evolve through a series of models performed.

• Translates solutions, pipeline capabilities, and hydraulics for all stakeholders by successfully representing solutions for the business with a combination of summaries, tables, graphics, slides, communication, and presentation.

• Potential to be responsible for the maintenance of existing and future tools and dashboards implemented by Investment Governance initiatives, including scheduling and ensuring routine refreshes, effective rollout to business, and team contribution and ownership of the various pipeline infrastructural and supply profiles.

• Potential to own and drive the holistic portfolio of modeling-oriented continuous improvement projects, geared at sustainable process improvement, consistency of both evaluation and communication between projects, and increased accuracy and efficiency of hydraulic simulation by the Strategic Planning team.

OCC support

• Is accountable for the handover of materialized projects to the Planning Teams and/or Execution teams that is clear, timely, and effective.

• Maintains user licenses, SIO Center access, and modeling tool maintenance (as it is critical to both Strategic Planning and E2E Planning teams' roles).

• Responsible for the creation and maintenance of the SIO Center network base models for existing pipeline configurations to enable those teams to accurately simulate planned outages and real-time situational scenarios. Further, models on request, specifically to support midterm planning by the E2E Planning Team where the future TAR situation is not yet in the base model.

• Works with E2E Planning Team and Execution Team Managers to incorporate improvements to current modeling strategies, philosophies, and procedures as well as trigger model tuning.

• Maintains the hydraulic modeling training program for the OCC operations teams.

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering or Business.

• Minimum of 2 years experience in and working knowledge of hydraulics and hydraulic modeling, or a minimum of 3 years experience and working knowledge of Air Liquide's pipeline business.

• Direct management or supervisory experience is preferred.

• Strong interpersonal, networking, negotiation, and facilitation skills, including ability to form working alliances with internal customers.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to produce high quality documents and perform presentations to management.

• Ability to accurately manage large quantities of data management.

• Ability to acquire and interpret internal data, making links to operational and hydraulic implications, and to accurately assess, model and interpret pipeline capability.

• Strong analytical skills and strategic mindset.

• Desire to develop and maintain a deep understanding of the business strategy, business requirements and incorporate this knowledge into business recommendations and evaluation of risk.

• Ability to deliver high quality modeling and recommendations, autonomously and with limited oversight.

• Familiarity with at least one detailed modeling tool is a plus.

• Strong proficiency in Google Docs and Sheets.

• Ability to manage competing priority for self and others while ensuring high quality deliverables.

• Ability to manage initiatives and projects from idea generation through to execution and delivery.

• Is occasionally on call during abnormal and emergency events. Can be consulted outside of normal working hours by OCC operations and management.

Our Differences make our Performance

At Air Liquide, we are committed to build a diverse and inclusive workplace that embraces the diversity of our employees, our customers, patients, community stakeholders and cultures across the world.

We welcome and consider applications from all qualified applicants, regardless of their background. We strongly believe a diverse organization opens up opportunities for people to express their talent, both individually and collectively and it helps foster our ability to innovate by living our fundamentals, acting for our success and creating an engaging environment in a changing world.