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Photo: Pär-Henrik Sjöström.
SPECIAL FEATURE:
Offshore Developments
The rocketing oil price boosts the offshore business like never before, but generally the sector is facing the same dark clouds on the horizon as the rest of the maritime sectors: How to recruit for the future.
Joakim Håkans, Managing Director of Baltic Pilot. Photo: Pär-Henrik Sjöström.
Baltic Pilot goes deep sea
The Finnish pilotage company Baltic Pilot expects that the rapidly increasing oil shipments from Russia will generate a dramatic rise in the demand for deep sea pilotage in the Baltic Sea area in the near future.
Ålesund in the county of Møre og Romsdal in Western Norway gathers several offshore companies. Photo: Rolf P Nilsson.
The Møre offshore cluster:
Strength at home is strength away
The people of Western Norway knows what it means to design, build, man and operate vessels for activities in the toughest conditions. They do it in fishing and since the 1970s they are also doing it in offshore.
In the district of Møre, a strong cluster of companies working in all aspects of offshore services has emerged and today it consists of 14 design companies, 14 shipowners, 12 shipyards and 139 equipment suppliers with around 18,000 employees and a turnover that passed NOK 31 billion in 2006.
The Mærsk Feeder, a platform supply vessel, working very close to the Maersk Endeavour in the Danish sector. Photo: Bent Mikkelsen.
New shipowning company in the Maersk Group
On April 29, 2008, A. P. Møller-Mærsk added another shipowning company to the cluster of the largest privately owned shipping company in the world. The company is named Maersk Supply Service A/S, now the registered owner of a fleet of offshore vessels ranging from platform supply vessels to the largest anchor handling vessels with a bollard pull above 250 tons.
Vytautas Vismantas, Chairman of the Board of the Lithuanian Shipping Company. Photo: Madli Vitismann.
Machinery and men must match
Vytautas Vismantas, Chairman of the Board of the Lithuanian Shipping Company (LJL), believes that the scarcity of seafarers is partly caused by machinery that no longer seems to be made for people.
Painting by Håkan Sjöström
Six names before the end in Greece
In December 1935 Rederiaktiebolaget Disa, belonging to the Brodin Group in Stockholm, placed an order for two new cargo ships with Aktiebolaget Lindholmens Varv in Göteborg. The maritime press introduced the newbuildings as ”the most interesting cargo motorship units that have come to our notice for some time”. These 3,750 dwt vessels had an overall length of 101 metres.
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The Island Wellserver, built to DNV Comfort Class 1. Photo: Blue.
Cruise comfort on the North Sea
The Island Wellserver is the first offshore vessel to be built to the highest level of DNV’s Comfort Class notation, meaning that the people on board can expect to live and work in an environment designed and built normally only met by demanding passengers on luxury cruise vessels.
Down to the bottom at greater depths with the CTCU system.
Odim in the deep
Odim has in just a few years time experienced an exceptional growth and developed from being a world leading supplier of cable-handling solutions in the seismic market, to a provider of automated handling systems for the offshore market and for military use.
Gazprom’s Prirazlomnaya platform, currently under construction to be delivered in 2009. It will then be stationed in the Prirazlomnoye oil field in the Pechora Sea. Photo: Sevmash.
Russian Arctic ambitions
According to the latest estimates, the energy resources of the Russian continental shelf amount to 103 billion tons of hydrocarbons. It is believed that the shelf is the main deposit of the Russian oil and gas reserves and other mineral deposits. Today the oil and gas production already provides approximately 20 per cent of the Russian Federation’s GDP and about 22 per cent of total Russian exports. Yet so far only fields in the Eastern and Southern parts of the shelf have seen any ‘action’.
The Mærsk Frontier is now being upgraded at Fredericia shipyard. Photo: Bent Mikkelsen.
Portrait of a workhorse
The platform supply vessels (PSV) are well known as the workhorses in the offshore business, being the supportive lifeline to shore. Danish giant Maersk Supply Service has a number of PSVs in their fleet of ships, serving a variety of operators world wide. One of them, the Mærsk Frontier, is very special.
It looks like slight chaos on the quayside, but it is all organised when a rig like the Mærsk Giant is being upgraded alongside in Esbjerg. Photo: Bent Mikkelsen.
Rigs file up in Esbjerg
Semco Maritime A/S at Esbjerg has already started the huge rebuild of the American owned jack-up rig GSF Galaxy III, which arrived at Esbjerg early in July. It will be the third jack-rig this year to call the unofficial ‘shipyard’ in Esbjerg, where Semco Maritime is the main contractor on the job.
The Helix Producer I (ex Karl) begins to look like a new ship at Rijeka, Croatia. Photo: Hays Maritime.
Soon ready for action in the Mexican Gulf
The former train ferry Karl, which has been the issue of articles in the previous two offshore theme issues, is still under construction at the Victor Lenac Shipyard in Rijeka, Croatia. The vessel is expected to be ready in July and will then be transferred to Houston, Texas, for further installation before being operative in the Mexican Gulf as from the beginning of 2009.
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