IDS, Kuala Lumpur, has appointed Douwe Franssens to the newly created position of general manager, IDS Group. His initial focus will be Northern Hemisphere operations.

Franssens

Franssens previous Iy worked as senior product manager and global real-time technology manager at Halliburton. He spent 8 years working globally in the dredging industry and then 17 years in a variety of technical and managerial positions in the oil and gas industry, with deployments to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Malaysia, Houston, and Canada.

IDS provides intuitive, end-to-end, web -based, upstream oil and gas data reporting services. It supports the drilling project life cycle from initial concept to final decommissioning.

BJ Services,

Houston, has opened a new base in Oirschot, near Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The new base replaces the previous process and pipeline services base in Oirschot that had been operating since 2001. It also serves as the new continental Europe /North Africa region headquarters for BJ's process and pipeline services group. Designed specifically to support oil, gas, and petrochemical customers across continental Europe, the new base currently houses the largest and most diverse fleet of onshore nitrogen services equipment in Europe. It will accommodate the largest fleet of mobile pipeline recompression systems, which will arrive in summer 2009 and early 2010. In addition, mobile flaring and chemical cleaning services equipment are located at the facility, giving production facilities and pipeline operators in Europe a full complement of start-up and shutdown services. The full range of BJ Services' process and pipeline services are available from Oirschot, including but not limited to cold and hot nitrogen services, pipeline gas recompression and mobile flaring services, chemical cleaning, hydrostatic testing, nitrogen and helium leak detection, and pipe freeze isolation services, as well as pipeline and process piping cleaning and drying.

BJ Services is a leading provider of field development and production enhancement services to the energy industry.

Aker Solutions ASA,

Oslo, has opened its expanded service and maintenance base at Aagotnes outside Bergen, Norway. The 50 million-kroner (Nor.) expansion will enable the company to further improve its onshore and offshore service support for subsea customers operating off Norway. A new workshop for maintenance of subsea equipment and a new office block, which includes state-ofthe-art support systems, has been set up on the existing base.