Chief riding high in new job | The Courier-Mail

THE Australian chief of one of the world's largest oil companies rides his bike to work.

Mark Nolan makes the 12km round trip from his East Hawthorn home to ExxonMobil's Southbank in Melbourne office at least a couple of times a week.

It's good training for the 51-year-old, who for the past seven years has lined up with about 40 members of his staff to compete in the 210km Around The Bay In A Day.

Last year he completed the circuit through Queenscliff and Sorrento in just under nine hours.

"It's getting harder every year," he says.

Nolan is chairman of ExxonMobil Australia, a role which sees him managing the company's oil and gas assets in Australia, as well as overseeing its network of 1200 service stations.

He was appointed to the position in 2004, although the job offer came out of the blue.

A quiet man, Nolan is humble about his achievements and says the promotion was unexpected.

But, he says, he was honoured to take on the role.

"It's an organisation I've invested nearly 30 year of my life in," he says.

The position also meant staying put in Melbourne.

"I think when I look back on my career compared to many of my colleagues as far as dislocation I've been very fortunate because I've spent a lot of it here in Australia," he says.

The son of a sheep farmer, Nolan spent his early years on a property south of Ballarat.

Though they later moved into town, the farm stayed in the family and is now a country escape for the oil chief and his wife Vicky, who have four sons aged 14 to 23.

Nolan was educated at Ballarat's St Patrick's College – famous for turning out the state's Premier Steve Bracks.

Nolan and Bracks were in the same class, but Nolan politely declines to share stories about their school days.

Nolan says his father, a very practical person, was a great influence on him in his formative years.

"He was very inventive, always doing things on the farm that were different and clever," he says.

"He taught me a lot of different, very practical skills playing with cars and building things."

Nolan lets slip that he could have studied medicine, but retreats back behind a wall of modesty when pushed on his results, saying only: "I did OK".

Instead, he chose mechanical engineering – an obvious choice, he says, because it was "hands on".

Nolan's first job out of university was in the Melbourne design office of mining giant CRA (now Rio Tinto).

The young engineer did some work on the Bougainville copper project, before moving to Queensland's Mary Kathleen uranium mine and later Mt Tom Price in the Pilbara.

But, having lived in mining camps for two years, Nolan wanted to "get back to civilisation" so, in late 1978, he took at job with Esso (a subsidiary of ExxonMobil) in Sale.

It was an exciting time for the company.

Its Bass Strait project – then Australia's largest offshore oil and gas development – was barely a decade old and Nolan was at the centre of its growth.

"We'd just put two platforms in the water and we were building West Kingfish, Cobia, Fortescue, Flounder one after the other as fast as we could, so it was a very, very exciting time, a great growth spurt," he says.

Nolan has spent at least half of his 25-year career with ExxonMobil focused on the Bass Strait and in three decades has witnessed some enormous changes.

Conventional, steel piled platforms were the norm in the early days, but technology has seen the development of offshore oil fields evolve.

Nolan played a part in the installation of one of the first subsea developments in the world at Cobia, and the development of Blackback in 1999, in 400 metres of water, was at the time Australia's deepest offshore well.

Sale's relative distance from heavy industry has also seen changes in the way ExxonMobil's infrastructure is built.

Recently, the company has used concrete, gravity-based structures.

"The concrete gravity enabled us to build things on site, even put the chairs and tables in the quarters and make the beds... then tow the whole finished facility and just sink it into the sea floor," Nolan says.

"We've applied some very innovative solutions because of the uniqueness of Bass Strait."

Nolan's rise to the top of the company began with a five-year secondment to the United States in the early '90s.

At ExxonMobil's international headquarters in New Jersey, he was put in charge of the company's operations in Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and Egypt before heading up its New Orleans office.

As well as international experience, the US stint left him with a taste for spicy food.

"Everything is spicy (in New Orleans). In fact I'm sure if you looked hard enough you'd find people who put Tabasco sauce on their cornflakes," he says.

In July 1998, Nolan returned to Australian as ExxonMobil's operations manager.

He was in the job just two months before the Longford explosion, which killed two workers and left the state without gas for two weeks.

"I remember it very well. I was in the Melbourne office and I was about to commence a meeting," he says.

Nolan is constrained in what he can say about the disaster. The company is still caught up in legal action with its joint venture partner BHP.

Nolan was in charge of the emergency response team in Melbourne, which went 24 hours a day, seven days a week after the explosion – and like the rest of the state, he went home to a cold shower.

"I was renting a house at the time ... and the water pressure was very low and that was personal torture, to wash that soap off under a dribbling shower," he says.

He headed up ExxonMobil Australia's upstream operations before taking on his current role.

The position exposed him to what he believes to be one of the most exciting oil and gas provinces in the world today – Papua New Guinea.

ExxonMobil is the operator of multi-billion dollar Papua New Guinea gas project, a mammoth development that, if approved, will involve constructing a 3200km pipeline from the PNG highlands to Queensland's far north and beyond.

The PNG gas project has long had its detractors, but has gained momentum in the past 12 months.

"None of us would have entered FEED (front-end engineering and design) if we hadn't been positively disposed to the opportunity," Nolan says.

"It's a challenging project but if the joint venture partners make a decision to proceed it will be great for the development of PNG and a great source of gas for the northern part of Australia."