Industrial-Gases Joint-Venture Operating Architecture Director — Energy

The mandate

Three parent companies are combining hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen assets while retaining feedstock, power and customer relationships. Their shareholder agreement reserves major decisions but does not define daily product allocation, maintenance priority, pipeline pressure response, curtailment or emergency communication. Without an operating constitution, the venture risks becoming a negotiation forum precisely when continuous customers need immediate decisions.

The deliverable is a Joint-Venture Operating Architecture containing decision rights, reserved-matter translation, operating services, asset and pipeline control, feedstock and energy interfaces, allocation logic, outage coordination, process-safety boundaries, performance measures and dispute escalation. It must make parent contributions measurable without confusing shareholder influence with the designate management team’s executive accountability.

Milestone one at week four accepts value streams and interdependencies; week nine closes legal-and-technical constraints. Decision architecture lands at week fourteen, service catalogue at week nineteen, asset playbooks at week twenty-five and governance pack at week twenty-nine. Five dispatch exercises conclude by week thirty-four; final acceptance and mobilisation backlog occur at week thirty-six.

Acceptance requires the designate team and parent-service owners to resolve unseen feedstock loss, power curtailment, pipeline restriction, customer allocation and simultaneous planned-outage scenarios inside approved authority. The steering committee signs only when product and cash reconcile, safety roles remain unambiguous, conflicts escalate within defined clocks and no critical choice depends on consultant or informal parent negotiation.

The client consortium will provide shareholder and service agreements, asset envelopes, permits, customer commitments, feedstock and power terms, maintenance plans, organisation assumptions, cost data and empowered parent owners. Exclusions include legal interpretation, process design, safety-case approval, customer negotiation, live dispatch, executive recruitment, technology implementation, asset transfer, tax advice and assurance over project completion or venture economics.

Why this is external work

Each parent has legitimate but different operating incentives, and the designate team lacks standing to arbitrate unresolved shareholder practices before incorporation. A neutral industrial-gases operator can translate agreements into daily decisions and expose failure modes without representing a parent, acting as venture management or offering legal and process-safety approval.

What you will own

• Trace all critical feedstock, energy, production, pipeline, inventory, customer and financial decisions across each parent interface.
• Translate reserved matters into practical executive delegations, thresholds, evidence, decision clocks and escalation without legal interpretation.
• Define measurable parent services for control, maintenance, laboratories, procurement, technology and tested emergency response continuity.
• Design allocation and curtailment logic across safety, contract, recoverability, customer criticality and economic consequence.
• Build outage coordination that reconciles plant, pipeline, parent-feedstock and anchor-customer dependencies.
• Rehearse feedstock loss, power curtailment, pipeline restriction, customer scarcity and overlapping shutdowns.
• Deliver the operating constitution, service catalogue, decision matrix, playbooks, exercise evidence and mobilisation backlog.

Candidate qualifications

• Designed or led industrial-gases, hydrogen, pipeline or continuous-process joint-venture operations internationally at scale.
• Translated shareholder reservations and parent services into executable daily operating authority across contested interfaces successfully.
• Understood production, pipeline dispatch, maintenance, process safety, feedstock and critical-customer dependencies.
• Built allocation and curtailment rules for scarce continuous products under contractual and safety constraints.
• Facilitated contested parent-company choices without assuming management, legal or technical-approval responsibility.
• Transferred a venture architecture through designate-team exercises with independently reconciled physical and financial outcomes.

Non-negotiables

• Can lead eleven Abu Dhabi laboratories and five dispatch exercises within nine months.
• Direct industrial-gases or hydrogen operating-model experience is required; generic JV governance is insufficient.
• Will disclose energy groups, gas producers, pipeline firms, anchor customers, investors and advisers.
• Will not interpret agreements, approve safety cases, negotiate customers, recruit executives or dispatch products.

1. 49 words maximum. Describe a joint-venture decision that failed because shareholder reservations lacked operating translation.
2. 49 words maximum. How would you test product allocation during simultaneous feedstock and pipeline constraints?
3. 49 words maximum. Which parent services must be defined before the designate team can rehearse?