Oliver Valvetek has been awarded the King’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation, recognising the company’s in-house Face Seal innovation for subsea gate valves, designed to enhance valve performance, reliability, and long-term confidence in extreme subsea environments
The King’s Award for Enterprise is one of the UK’s highest official business honours, recognising outstanding achievement by British businesses. This is the third Royal Award for Oliver Valvetak and the fourth achieved across the Oliver family companies.
Nick Howard, engineering director at Oliver Valvetek, helped develop the award-winning innovation, working alongside Oliver Valvetek’s UK-based research and development team to provide a solution to the subsea sealing challenge.
Howard also attended a special reception at St James’s Palace, where he had the honour of meeting His Majesty The King following the company’s King’s Award.
At the heart of the award is a new Face Seal arrangement for Oliver Valvetek’s subsea gate valves. Developed in-house, the design replaces a conventional spring-energised lip seal with a simpler, one-piece PEEK polymer seal.
The Face Seal uses system pressure to enhance the seal. As operating pressure increases, the seal becomes more effective, supporting greater reliability in high-pressure subsea applications.
The innovation has been qualified for working pressures from 5,000 psi to 20,000 psi and simulated water depths of up to 4,000m. It has also helped Oliver Valvetek reinforce in-house manufacturing capabilities, enhance quality control, simplify assembly, and reduce reliance on external suppliers.
Speaking after the reception, Howard said, “Meeting His Majesty The King at St James’s Palace was a tremendous honour and a very proud moment, not just for me personally, but for everyone involved in this achievement.
“The King’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation recognises a huge amount of engineering work, testing and practical problem-solving from our team here in the UK. The Face Seal development is a great example of innovation with a clear purpose, improving performance and reliability for customers operating in some of the most demanding subsea environments in the world.”
The formal presentation of the King’s Award will take place in September, providing another opportunity to celebrate the achievement with the wider Oliver Valvetek team.
