Sir Ian Wood, who has died aged 84, was the most extraordinary entrepreneur to emerge from the age of North Sea oil. Starting from a local business base in Aberdeen, centred mainly on the fishing industry, he built an international oil and gas engineering conglomerate that operated in more than 60 countries.

When he stepped down from its leadership in 2013, his creation – Wood Group plc – had grown into a global business valued at $12bn, employing 60,000 people and elevating his personal fortune to around £2bn. The later years of his life were devoted largely to philanthropy, centred around his own carefully chosen projects.

Wood confounded every image of the flamboyant oil tycoon. His persona was much more in keeping with the thrifty Aberdonian stereotype, hard-nosed in business while eschewing private jets and fancy corporate headquarters. His style was intensely hands-on as he travelled the world, wherever there was oil and gas, in pursuit of contracts and deals.

The young Ian was brought up in an environment of business and enterprise. His father, John, had bought out a partner in a ship repair business, which diversified into ownership of trawlers. As a student in the 1960s, Ian watched as the firm’s trawlers were in the frontline of Britain’s “cod wars” with Iceland, which was defending the 12-mile limit of its territorial waters, disputed by the UK, against foreign interlopers.

On one occasion, a British gunboat, HMS Pallister, was dispatched to protect a Wood trawler. By the time it got there, the trawler had been rammed by an Icelandic gunboat and towed to Reykjavik, along with its captain and crew. The drama of these events did not conceal the fact that the Aberdeen trawler industry was facing ongoing decline, which made diversification of the local economy essential.

In 1967, at the age of 25 and before the major discoveries of North Sea oil, Ian became chairman and managing director of the John Wood Group and set about expanding it into one of the largest private industrial companies in Scotland. Much of its activity was around Aberdeen harbour, where the increasing visibility of work related to oil exploration in the North Sea signalled an opportunity to be seized.

Wood later recalled a crucial event in 1972 when Maitland Mackie, a leading business figure in Aberdeenshire, organised a group to visit Texas to explore potential for local involvement in North Sea developments. He said: “I hadn’t a clue what I was going for, but it was a complete eureka experience. I came back and said: ‘We’ve got it wrong. We’re going to have to form new companies and take on new people.’”

His father was sceptical and advised caution in placing too much emphasis on the new industry. However Ian’s view was now fixed and the following year the Wood Group took a stand at the inaugural Offshore Europe exhibition in Aberdeen, establishing key contacts with oil exploration companies that needed logistical support.

The Wood business was one of the few in the north-east of Scotland that had the resources to invest in these new opportunities, but it was Ian’s leadership drive that subsequently turned it into one of the biggest players in the North Sea services industry and then carried that expertise around the world, wherever offshore oil and gas was found.

In 1988, the Piper Alpha disaster, when an oil platform exploded in the North Sea, left a deep personal mark. Of the 167 who died, 39 were Wood Group employees. Through all his public and business roles, Wood went on to become a champion of improved offshore safety.

Ian was the second of three children of Margaret (nee Clark) and John Wood. He was schooled at Robert Gordon’s college in Aberdeen and graduated from Aberdeen University in 1964 with first-class honours in psychology. He intended to become a lecturer but instead was drawn into the more exciting world of the family business – “cod wars” and all.

While building a global business, Wood found time to undertake a wide range of onerous public positions, many of them linked to the north-east of Scotland and the offshore industries. From 1997 to 2000, he chaired Scotland’s main economic development agency, Scottish Enterprise. He was a director of the Royal Bank of Scotland from 1988 to 1997 and his frugal instincts would probably have saved it from its subsequent trajectory if he had stayed longer.

He became chancellor of Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen in 2004 and retained that position for 17 years, with the same hands-on approach, helping enhance its reputation through links with industry. The position involved him in controversy when he bestowed an honorary degree on Donald Trump in 2010, linked to development of a golf course in the area. It was rescinded five years later after Trump called for Muslims to be banned from entering the US.

The Wood Group was listed on the Stock Exchange in 2002 and continued to expand by diversification and acquisition into other energy sectors and related industries. Arguably, the scale and pace of this growth made it vulnerable to problems that arose after Wood’s retirement. In March this year, the Wood Group was acquired by a Dubai-based company, Sidara.

Wood established a family foundation in 2007 and one of its primary areas of activity was on making markets work for the poor in sub-Saharan Africa, through projects that included support for smallholder tea farmers in Tanzania and vanilla production in Uganda.

In 2015, he joined the Giving Pledge, making a public commitment to donate more than half his wealth to philanthropic causes. Ever committed to Aberdeen and its future, in one of his last public acts he pledged £40m last year to help accelerate the region’s transition to employment in renewable energy.

Wood was knighted in 1994 and in 2018 appointed to the Order of the Thistle.

He is survived by his wife, Helen (nee Macrae), whom he married in 1970, three sons and seven grandchildren.

• Ian Clark Wood, businessman and philanthropist, born 21 July 1942; died 26 July 2026