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Back to SSG 12
In the Kristiansand area most of the work is brain work. The engineering part of offshore is a major part of the work in Southern Norway. Photo: Aker Kværner
Kristiansand: Engineering capital
of the offshore industry
When thinking about offshore in Norway, the name Stavanger is one of the first things to strike you, but in fact another name is quite obvious too: Kristiansand.
Although the city is situated some 350 km from Stavanger, it has a great influence on what goes on in Stavanger and vice–versa, as a lot of the offshore know-how is in Kristiansand. At the moment it is a booming industry fuelled by a crude oil price speeding toward USD 80 per barrels. This leads to a lot of investments and new projects in offshore, leading back to a lot of orders to the industry ashore.
These facts have induced SSG to take a tour in Kristiansand to feel the pulse of the industry, where it all started in early 1966, just before the drill was put in the sea on the Ekofisk field in the Norwegian sector as the first construction to the sector was made in Kristiansand.
Mainly design and engineering
The road and railway service between Kristiansand and Stavanger is a familiar area for all the thousands that work in the offshore related industries. The industries around Kristiansand are mainly design and engineering companies, but there is also some heavy industry. The heavy steel constructions are made in other countries like Poland and Russia (Baltic) nowadays and transported to Kristiansand by ship or by lorry before being fitted out with more delicate equipment and mounted together before being shipped off to a shipyard in order to be a part of a bigger construction, like a drilling rig or a production platform.
Before some huge construction or rig leaves a shipyard in Singapore and in Korea it is likely that a lot of its equipment has been around Kristiansand in the hands of skilled Norwegian workers.
On the following pages we will take the reader to a number of the industries working out of Kristiansand.
NODE
During the last couple of years a lot of effort has been made to bring all this know-how in the Kristiansand area together under one umbrella called Norwegian Offshore & Drilling Engineering or NODE. The participating companies have created a forum for discussion and a united front towards national and local government.
“We have created a unique position in the daily work”, explains Kjell Johannessen, managing director of NODE. “Obviously the local administration wants more jobs and more taxpayers in the area, but we are to guide the politicians and civil servants. Creating more jobs in the industry requires more housing, kindergartens, more road capacity, more school capacity and a number of things in the infrastructure, but this is often forgotten until it is too late and our highly skilled and well paid employees are stuck in a traffic jam somewhere on their way to work. It is really a waste of time and one of the areas where we can help.”
In NODE there has been a very co-operative atmosphere amongst the companies, which in many situations are competitors.
A little reserved
“At the start”, Kjell Johannessen explains, “a number of top executives were a little reserved about talking to and meeting their competitors, but I think we have created some guidelines and rules for the talks and work in the committees, making everybody feel safe during the networking.”
NODE works closely with a number of institutions on various levels. Sørlandets Kompetancefond is a foundation set up to support the education of young people for the future of the industry. NODE is also working with technical high schools and universities of technology in order to support the best brains for the coming jobs in the offshore industry in the Kristiansand area. Part of the work is also to make plans for the future by arranging conferences and other public appearances.
//Bent Mikkelsen
Latest update 20-06-2007 8:40
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No 12/2008
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2007