2019:  MARCH | APRIL
VIEW COMPLETE 2018 ARCHIVES

Oil Spill Monitoring
Tech for Petrobras

Miros Group will supply eight oil spill detection (OSD) systems to Petrobras in the world’s largest X-band radar-based OSD surveillance and response contract to date. The agreement is in partnership with Ulstein Belga Marine, primary supplier to Petrobras, and includes radars and thermal imaging cameras for Petrobras mobile offshore production units (MOPUs) in the Campos Basin. Delivery and commissioning are scheduled for 2019.

The backdrop for the record delivery is a February 2018 agreement between Petrobras and the Brazilian federal environmental agency, Ibama, committing Petrobras to recently enhanced Ibama standards for controlling oil discharge in water.

ROSEN Expansion in Aberdeen

The ROSEN Group continues to implement its North Sea growth strategy with the opening of a new Aberdeen office. Since opening the new office, ROSEN is already working with several of the major operators in the North Sea, providing pipeline integrity, asset life extension and corrosion management services.

Acting as a hub for the company’s North Sea integrity consultancy services, ROSEN’s Aberdeen base is headed by Technical Manager Bryn Roberts, who has more than 25 years’ experience in integrity, materials, corrosion and welding engineering for both service companies and oil and gas operators.

The next two years will see Rosen’s Aberdeen base increase in size to at least 20 personnel, reflecting an investment in both established industry expertise and the development of recent graduates.

UTEC Awarded Multivessel
Survey Work Offshore India

UTEC, an Acteon company, has been awarded a subcontract by McDermott International for a series of survey workscopes offshore eastern India. UTEC will provide surface and subsea positioning services during the installation of subsea flowlines, pipeline end manifolds and terminations, jumpers, risers and umbilicals that form part of the development of a field in water depths to 2,100 m.

The work was to commence in December 2018. The project management team is based in Singapore, supported by personnel from UTEC’s office in Perth, Australia. Project support is also being provided by McDermott’s office in Kuala Lumpur.

Scottish Grant Award
To Support Decom Market

Decom North Sea, the membership organization for the oil and gas late-life and decommissioning sector, has successfully secured a Decommissioning Challenge Fund grant award from the Scottish government. The £5 million fund aims to provide opportunities for the supply chain in Scotland supporting the acceleration of projects to develop investment-grade business cases and to fund new structures and infrastructure, allowing recipients to compete within the decommissioning market.

Following a consultation with its membership and external stakeholders, Decom North Sea identified the need for a more integrated, collaborative approach to share knowledge across the decommissioning sector. The grant was requested to create and develop a digital knowledge hub.

Deloitte, Oil & Gas UK
Annual Collaboration Survey

The oil and gas industry’s drive to increase collaboration between suppliers and operators in the U.K. Continental Shelf (UKCS) has continued to maintain a consistent performance, according to an annual survey by Deloitte and Oil & Gas UK that includes the Collaboration Index, measuring the effectiveness of companies as partners in collaboration. The findings of the UKCS Upstream Supply Chain Collaboration survey 2018 showed that while activity levels in the basin were gradually picking up and the appetite for collaboration remains very high, the industry-wide Collaboration Index score of 7.1 has remained the same as 2017. This is a strong sign that the industry can increase efforts to build on the track record it has attained over the past three years.

However, suppliers and operators switched places, with the operator score falling from 7.2 to 7.0 and the supplier score moving up by the same amount. This means that suppliers were once again scoring higher than operators, as they were in 2015 and 2016.

Where collaboration was successful, trust was cited as the most important reason, followed by mutual benefits.

Graham Hollis, senior partner for Deloitte in Aberdeen, said: “We expected to see greater awareness among respondents about the value of digital technologies, which has the potential to drive a new wave of productivity across the industry. Organizations do not necessarily need large up-front investments of time and capital to test and roll out new technologies and processes. Effective collaboration should not be forgotten when oil prices rise and the industry gets busier; this will only lead to a reversal of the efficiency gains of the last three years.”

Innovation Incubator
To Spur Job Growth

Attollo Offshore has launched its Aberdeen-based Innovation Incubator for smarter operations of the assets required for late-field life, decommissioning, rigless well intervention, plug and abandonment, and offshore wind projects.

Expected to create 20 jobs, the Incubator will bring Atollo’s operational and academic minds together to accelerate the digital transformation of its offshore operations using automation, data analytics and artificial intelligence. Attollo will also study how the modern workforce can better engage with technology to enhance human capability in the offshore environment.