Edward Heerema

Edward Heerema is a Dutch engineer and businessman, born in 1947, who founded the offshore contracting company Allseas in 1985 and long remained its sole owner. He is the son of Pieter Schelte Heerema, the offshore oil industry pioneer, and spent his childhood in Venezuela, where his father worked as an engineer. He later worked for eight years at his father's firm Heerema Marine Contractors, where he was put in charge of the research and development department, and after his father's death in 1981 he and his brothers ran that company for some years. Allseas became the first owner of a dynamically positioned pipe-laying ship, the Lorelay, by 1986, and under his ownership the company kept an in-house engineering department rather than outsourcing its projects. It developed the platform decommissioning and pipe-laying ship Pioneering Spirit, which entered service in 2016 and was for a time the largest ship in the world. In 2016 the Royal Netherlands Society of Engineers (KIVI) made him a Fellow Chartered Engineer.