Unique New Gas Engineering Training Facility Officially Open By IGEM President

News Release: Tuesday 20 October 2009

Develop Training Ltd are pleased to announce the Official Opening of their New Gas Engineering Training Facility in Huby, near York. The facility is the only training centre in the country that replicates the 'real life' Pressure Control and Network Maintenance environment and will appeal to all Utility Network owners and associated contractors. To mark the occasion the facility was officially opened on Wednesday 7th October by IGEM President, Gordon Davies CEng, FIGEM.

The facility is a modern, state of the art industrial building with a thermal roof giving 400 m2 of insulated workshop space that includes training rigs that can be used in the design, construction and testing of gas distribution networks. In addition to Pressure Control, the centre also offers training facilities that cover Escape, Locate & Repair, First Call Operative and Gas Utilisation (ACS) disciplines.

To add to this, the facility is set amidst a stunning eight acres of parkland within the beautiful North Yorkshire countryside providing excellent accommodation and training room facilities to suit all types of trainee, from new apprentices to experienced supervisory staff. Over the next 12 months a significant amount of investment will go towards the introduction of Smart metering training as well as other low carbon initiative training as the market heads towards this direction.

Phil Henderson, Head of Apprentices at Develop Training Ltd states 'The new training facility at York allows us to give training on Network maintenance and Pressure Control system maintenance on our own site. Before, we had to rely on the support of using our clients facilities, so the introduction of York increases the flexibility of our training and apprenticeship offerings'

The facility has proved to be a great success so far for Develop, having being successfully used as part of the company's extensive Apprenticeship Programmes and operational gas training for their major utility clients such as United Utilities Plc. Attending the Open Day was a range of Utility Network owners and contractors such as United Utilities, National Grid, Morrison Utility Services, Morgan Est, Northern Gas Networks and E-On to name a few.

The day proved to be a great success in providing the full capabilities of the facility to Develop's main client base through an in-depth presentation including a comprehensive and interactive questions and answers session where the guests were given the chance to interact with members of Develop's management team and gas engineering trainers.

Chris Garforth, Network Support Manager of United Utilities Plc, states 'The facility and its capabilities will appeal to all Utility Network owners and Contractors that have training requirement needs in this area. We have been using the facility to train 60 Apprentices and we are confident that the new facility combined with Develop's experienced and specialist trainers ensure our trainees are receiving the best training possible before they go out into the real world'

Phil Henderson goes on to state 'In order to meet the needs of our clients we will design bespoke courses that include First Call Operatives, Escape Locate and Repair, Pressure Control, Pipeline Maintenance, Liquefied Natural Gas and Electrical and Instrumentation. All our trainers have been previously employed by National Utility Providers are Associate Members of the Institute of Learning, having completed an NVQ Level 3 in Learning and Development.

New features of the facility include High Pressure units including Axial flows, Fisher 310's, Tartarini and Fiorienti's, Low Pressure units including Donkin 270's, 280's and 680's, Actaris, Profile equipment, service governors, WBH tank and burners, filter bank, pressure and temperature transmitters, electrical wiring boards, pipe bending bays and Jet Stream and controllers.

Gordon Davies, opening the event President of IGEM stated:

'With the break up of the former integrated British Gas industry and the establishment of numerous gas companies throughout the UK, training has become a key ingredient to maintaining the required high level of competency and safety within the industry. The service that Develop provides through these excellent new facilities makes a vital contribution to this.

The President then went onto formerly declare Develops new training facility open.