A group of young professionals from Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) sections across Europe recently visited Tenaris’s offices and industrial facilities in Romania, as part of the SPE Beyond the Borders initiative.
Launched in 2018 by the SPE sections of France, Italy and Romania, Beyond the Borders brings together young professionals from across Europe for multi-day events that combine industrial visits, technical sessions and networking.
Bringing together participants with different professional and academic backgrounds, the experience combined an introduction to Tenaris in Bucharest, by Paolo Novelli, Tenaris Technical Sales Regional Director, with an immersive visit to Tenaris’s solar park and the steel shop in Călărași. The 20 MW solar park, the largest on-site park in Romania, supplies energy to the Călărași steel shop.
The event created an opportunity to discover the company and its operations, and a space for participants to exchange ideas, strengthen professional connections and experience Romania for the first time.
Bengt Wesselink, a Petroleum Engineering master’s student, shared: “Seeing the steel manufacturing process up close was very impressive. After visiting Tenaris’s seamless pipe mill in Italy last year, this experience offered another valuable perspective, and I especially enjoyed sharing it with members of other SPE sections.”
Inside the steel shop, technical concepts became tangible. For Ovidiu Vlad, a production engineer with Romgaz and an SPE member for more than three years, the visit offered rare access to a process he described as spectacular: “The steel mill visit was an experience we do not have every day. The processes and presentations were fascinating and offered a valuable refresher on the metallurgy and steelmaking concepts I studied at university.”
The scale of the operations also stood out to Joelle El Sayegh, a production technical advisor at Halliburton. “Visiting the Bucharest offices and the Călărași steel mill brought the entire production process to life,” she explained. “What impressed me most was the scale of the operation—from raw materials to finished pipes—and the number of processes completed every day.”
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