William H. Luyties III, P.E., M.ASCE

William H. Luyties III, P.E., M.ASCE joined Shell Oil Company upon graduation from college in 1976 and spent 30 years working on the development of offshore platforms, including design, construction installation, and project management. His first major project was the Eureka platform, installed offshore California in 700 feet of water, where he was lead design engineer before becoming site construction engineer. At the time it was the sixth deepest platform in the world. He followed up with several other fixed platforms and then moved into the area of deepwater floating platforms, where he was responsible for structural design and construction support for the string of record deepwater Tension Leg Platforms (TLPs) installed by Shell. The first of those, the Auger TLP, in 2,860 feet of water, received the ASCE Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement Award in 1995. In 1996, Mr. Luyties took the role of Civil/Marine Engineering Manager and had overall responsibility for design and construction support for all new Shell offshore structures in the United States and in international deepwater.

In 2000 Mr. Luyties moved from design and construction of offshore facilities to project management when he became Project Manager for the Na Kika Project, a $1.5 billion development in the Gulf of Mexico in record-breaking 6,350 feet water depth. Na Kika won the Offshore Technology Conference Outstanding Achievement Award in 2004. Mr. Luyties then moved to the Russian Federation as Project Manager for the two gravity-based offshore platforms, Lunskoye and Piltun, to be installed in the frontier region offshore Sakhalin Island in far east Russia. At $3.2 billion, these projects represented some of the most significant parts of the broader $20 billion Sakhalin development by Shell and were the first new design and constructed offshore platforms in the Russian Federation.

Mr. Luyties retired from Shell and joined Luminant Generation Construction (previously TXU) in October 2006 as a member of the leadership team for the construction of new coal-fired power generation facilities in Texas. He is responsible for the delivery of the first of these projects to start construction, Sandow 5 plant, a nearly $1 billion development, which will generate 565 MW of electricity utilizing the latest in technology for the clean burning of coal.

Mr. Luyties received his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and his master’s degree in civil engineering from MIT in 1976. During his career he was an active participant on America Petroleum Institute committees that developed design codes for the offshore industry in the areas of joint design, dynamic analysis, and fatigue. He lectured for the University of Texas continuing education course “Design of Floating Production Facilities” from its inception through 2003. He has represented the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in the Offshore Technology Conference since the early 1990s, and served as ASCE’s representative on the Offshore Technology Conference Board of Directors for eight years. He is also a founding sponsor of the Deepwater Infrastructure Forum for the Coasts, Oceans, Ports, and Rivers Institute of ASCE. He is a registered professional engineer in California and Texas.