NORTH-EAST engineering consultants will play a key role in a new £50m BP deal that has been won by Amec Foster Wheeler.

Staff at the firm’s Tees Valley Centre at Lingfield Point business park in Darlington will be using their expertise to assist the five-year contract to provide operations, maintenance and project support to BP’s Forties North Sea Pipeline, and Central Area Transmission System (CATS) terminal in the North-East.

The contract, which will be managed from Amec Foster Wheeler’s Aberdeen offices, will secure 90 jobs, including two apprenticeships based at the CATS terminal at Seal Sands, on Teesside where gas is processed from the North Sea for delivery into the UK’s network of pipelines.

Amec, which has its European engineering division headquartered in Darlington, last year agreed a £2bn deal to buy US firm Foster Wheeler, which has offices in Middlesbrough, in a bid to win more work in the oil and gas sector.

Alan Johnstone, Amec Foster Wheeler’s managing director for Upstream Asset Solutions, said: "Amec Foster Wheeler has been supporting BP since 1995 and this 20-year relationship demonstrates the strength of our position in asset support services for the world’s leading oil producers."

The rebranded Amec Foster Wheeler employs about 700 people in the combined Tees Valley operations, with an additional 200-plus in its environmental services headquarters in Newcastle. An additional 500 people are employed across the region off-site or on project work.

The group's North-East offices offer a wide range of expertise in sectors including, water and wastewater engineering services, transmission and distribution, onshore and offshore asset management, and clean energy, including CCS (carbon capture and storage).

In its first set of annual results since last year's merger, the FTSE 250 business last month reported a 39.2 per cent decline in pre-tax profit to £155m, largely due to the cost of buying Foster Wheeler, but total revenue grew 2 per cent to £3.92bn, in line with expectations.

The business hopes that rising revenue from its power business, and the broader range of contracts that will up for grabs to the combined business will help offset for declines in oil operations this year after the crash in crude oil prices.