On June 11, PACE held its annual Zenith Awards. Ross Colvin was the winner in Lifetime Achievement category.
Ross is Systems and Process Control (S&PC) Office Lead at Hatch, a supplier of engineering, project and construction management services, process and business consulting and operational services to the mining, metallurgical, energy and infrastructure industries.
Ross’ role entails supervising the activities of some 25 engineers and designers in the S&PC Group, located in Brisbane. This includes recruiting, training, career development and assigning resources to local and international projects, site operations support and commissioning roles.
The role requires interaction with other engineering discipline leads under the office engineering manager. Also the supply of S&PC resources to commissioning group on major international projects is a responsibility.
Ross is an electrical engineer with around 38 years’ experience, including 25 years with BHPE/Hatch.
His career started in 1977, when he worked as an engineer for CRA Bougainville Copper in PNG. In 1981 he moved to Brisbane, where worked for CSR’s Coal Division; then from 1983 – 1987 he worked for CSR Delhi Petroleum in Adelaide.
Since then he has clocked up 25 years’ service with BHPE/Hatch.
He has extensive consulting experience in estimating, design, construction and commissioning of electrical, instrument and control systems for projects in the oil and gas, minerals processing, and materials handling industries.
He has held roles including instrument and electrical design team leader on a number of Greenfield and Brownfield projects. He also has diverse experience in oil, copper, coal, silver/lead/zinc, nickel, aluminium, sand mining industries and is familiar with both instrument and electrical design.
Ross was the office lead engineer for the S&PC team in Brisbane for around seven years to 2014 where he was responsible for S&PC recruitment, training and staffing of projects and operations support executed from the Brisbane office. Previously he was the lead Electrical and S&PC engineer on the ERA R3D Underground Mine Surface Infrastructure feasibility study.
He completed the Tati Activox Project feasibility for LionOre where his responsibilities included leading the Brisbane control and instrument team work-sharing an area of a hydrometallurgical nickel project in Botswana with the South African office. Previously he was the lead S&PC engineer on the Queensland Nickel expansion Project in Townsville for BHP/QNI. In that role he was responsible for the control and instrument design team.
In addition, Ross is currently the IICA Brisbane committee chairman and as such participates on the IICA Federal Council.
He has always held the philosophy that the people on his team can never receive enough industry related training, and has encouraged his people to attend as many IICA and other institutional training courses as possible. This is a refreshing approach when most of industry is cutting back on training, and it has earned him the respect of his teams.
At the same time, he brings this strong culture of training to the Federal Council, and he is actively involved in implementing a member certification program in the IICA.
A quiet achiever, Ross Colvin is an asset to the ACI industry and a worthy winner of the Zenith Lifetime Achievement Award for 2015.