utorak, 24. ožujka 2015.

Vroon: ‘VOS Glamour’ reaches Aberdeen (Gallery)

One of Vroon’s newest vessels, VOS Glamour, yesterday arrived in Aberdeen, following its long journey from Fujian Shipbuilding Trading in Fuzhou, China.

The launch of the vessel VOS Glamour took place in June 2014 and the naming ceremony was held in November at Fujian South East Shipyard in China. VOS Glamour was delivered to Vroon in December. After the delivery, the vessel embarked upon its long journey to Aberdeen.

VOS Glamour is a 60-m ERRV-FSV (emergency response and rescue vessel/field-support vessel) and the first in a series of four such FSVs being built for Vroon. The vessels feature a revolutionary, wave-piercing bow shape and a 300m2 cargo deck. The remaining three vessels will be operational in the coming months.

VOS Glamour will operate in the North Sea out of Aberdeen for Vroon Offshore Services. It is now being prepared for duties and will start a long-term charter on February 25.

petak, 20. ožujka 2015.

Aberdeen is paying the price for oil's decline

Six years after the financial crisis, with the rest of Britain poised to boom, Aberdeen faces a downturn

Aberdeen is like no other place in Scotland. The prosperity that the oil industry brings to the city is evident from the moment you step off the plane at the airport, where luxurious Mercedes AMG taxis with plush leather seats queue to ferry the lines of oil workers, engineers and executives who fly in and out on a daily basis to the hundreds of offices and rigs belonging to Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Petrofac and others.

Even the ATM machines in the arrivals hall are calibrated to automatically offer £200 as the minimum withdrawal, geared to serve the thousands of high-income professionals in the oil industry who pass through after weeks spent working offshore in one of the world’s most inhospitable environments. But these days people are nervous in the “Granite City”, a name it earned almost a century before oil was first discovered in the North Sea. Aberdeen’s original resources boom was in the quarrying and export of the tough slate-grey rock from which so many of the city’s grand old buildings are built.

Unlike the rest of the country, which suffered badly during the global financial crisis, Aberdeen was untouched by the recession because of the rapid rebound in oil prices to more than $100 per barrel.

When asked about the effects of the economic downturn, which erupted in 2008, people in the city will say “what financial crisis, it never happened up here?”

Aberdeen and its surrounding “shire”, with a gross value added (GVA) of £31,753 per person, is the most economically productive region in the whole of the UK, outside inner London. Over the past decade, GVA has increased by almost 59pc in the region, compared with a rate of 35pc on average for the rest of the UK, according to Aberdeen City Council

The irony is that six years after the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, Aberdeen is finally about to experience its own form of slump at a time when the rest of the UK economy is poised to boom, spurred on by the benefits of the falling price of a barrel of crude and cheaper energy costs.
From Aberdeen to Houston in Texas, Dubai and Perth, Western Australia, global oil and gas hubs are suffering a dose of economic reality after a 60pc slump in the price of oil since June and the fear that the cost of a barrel could remain at levels around $50 for years to come have prompted companies to cut back on investment.
Although building work on new office and residential developments is evident across the city, there are already signs that the impact of the job losses and investment cutback that have started to directly hit the oil industry, upon which the local economy depends, are being felt further afield.
A recent survey by accountancy firm Moore Stephens showed a 45pc jump in “risky mortgages” in the City – the highest level in Scotland. However, that hasn’t stopped some sellers rushing to capitalise on what could be the last days of the city’s property boom.
One Aberdeen mansion went on the market last month hoping to fetch £3.2m. If the property sells, it would beat the current record for a residential property in Aberdeen, which was achieved in December when a granite-built town house in the city’s exclusive Rubislaw Den neighbourhood was sold recently for just over £3m irrespective of concerns about the plummeting value of oil. Despite the high prices that continue to be asked for property, people in the city are growing nervous that tougher times could be just around the corner.
“There is certainly an air of doom and gloom around the place these days,” one oil field engineer working in Aberdeen told The Sunday Telegraph.
That sense of doom has increased since the big oil majors began to lay off hundreds of workers. BP cut just under 10pc of its 3,500-strong workforce in Aberdeen last month. It was followed by Sinopec-Talisman making similar lay-offs. Next week, Tullow Oil is expected to detail the scale of its cuts to headcount.

Budget 2015: North Sea tax cuts fail to lift gloom in Aberdeen

Down at Aitchie’s free house, a favourite stop near the harbour for oil workers returning from offshore work, neither a pint nor the prospect of financial assistance from the government was soothing the anxiety. One group of workers, back from two weeks at sea, said that from September they would have to work an extra week for the same pay – three weeks on the rig and two weeks off, compared to the current two-two pattern.
“There are no ifs and no buts,” said Paul. “I have just signed up with a union in case I need legal representation.” His co-worker, who declined to give his name, said morale had never been so bad, with cuts affecting every aspect of life on the rig as oil operators strive to save money in the face of a slumping oil price. “They are even taking out Sky. Now it is Freeview.”

Rig workers are being asked to work more hours for the same pay across the industry, according to Jake Molloy, regional organiser at the RMT union, representing 5,500 North Sea workers.
While George Osborne boasted that Britain was “walking tall again”, Molloy was meeting industry executives, who told him to expect more pay cuts and redundancies. He said the chancellor’s tax breaks would do nothing to alleviate “slash and burn”. “Mr Osborne put a bundle of cash in big oil shareholders’ pockets … it’s a pretty disappointing day for the guys at the sharp end.

“It is not a question of whether the industry deserves it or not: it is purely in the selfish interest of UK plc,” he told the Guardian. But he forecast that up to 10,000 jobs could still be lost in the next 18 months. The UK offshore oil and gas industry currently employs around 375,000 people, but a report by consultancy EY last year estimated that nearly 10% of those jobs could be lost over the next five years.
Stewart Mitchell, chief executive of Sparrows, a firm providing offshore services such as crane engineering and laying cables, said the government had listened to the industry. While he did not rule out job cuts, he said: “It certainly makes things a lot easier not to take those drastic decisions right now.”
Shell, a major player in the North Sea, said: “Without rapid change, the viability of the basin is under threat.”

Despite warnings from environmental groups that a boost in North Sea oil production would hit climate change targets, Wood insisted that new oil wells were the best option for “UK plc”. “I believe the UK economy and the UK energy requirements means it essential that we maximise economic recovery from oil and gas reserves.”
But he said the inevitable long-term decline in oil output means that Aberdeen “needs to do a lot in the next 10 to 15 years to plan for a city without oil”.
Back at Aitchie’s, oil worker George Baxter, 65, said he wouldn’t choose a career in oil if he was starting out now. “Say I was a young 20-year-old, I’d be thinking of an alternative in the energy sector. I think it has got to be windfarms, things like that, or fracking.”

Unions To Ballot UK North Sea Oil Workers Over Appetite For Strike - See more at: http://www.rigzone.com/news/oil_gas/a/137764/Unions_To_Ballot_UK_North_Sea_Oil_Workers_Over_Appetite_For_Strike#sthash.uRYgEYBV.dpuf

Norway's Statoil Sets Precedent With Government Payment Disclosure - See more at: http://www.rigzone.com/news/oil_gas/a/137766/Norways_Statoil_Sets_Precedent_With_Government_Payment_Disclosure#sthash.UvFENkLa.dpuf

Repsol completes drilling of Sandia-1 well

Repsol has announced that the company has completed the drilling of an exploration well in the Canary Islands. On 11th January, a total depth of 3,093 metres (882 metres of water depth and 2,211 metres of subsoil) was reached and the collection of data on the traversed geological formations was completed. The well will be sealed throughout the next week under the strictest safety protocols, the same that have been applied during the entire exploratory drilling campaign. Around 750 professionals from over 50 companies have worked on the research project, applying the highest safety and environmental protection standards at all times. At the start of this campaign, Repsol estimated the possibility of finding hydrocarbons at between 15% and 20%. The company carried out the campaign in the belief that a discovery of hydrocarbons would be beneficial for the Spanish economy. The excellence of all operations related to this campaign was achieved thanks to the deployment of top professionals – not only from Repsol, but also from other contracted companies, some of them from the Canary Islands – and the use of cutting-edge technology such as the Rowan Renaissance dynamically-positioned UDW drillship, which was supported by four other vessels. Repsol has great experience in offshore exploration. The company’s reserve replacement ratio (the amount of reserves added by the company compared to the production) was 204% in 2012 and 275% in 2013, among the highest in the industry.

četvrtak, 19. ožujka 2015.

Transocean sends another four rigs to scrapyard

Transocean Ltd. has issued its monthly Fleet Update Summary according to which the company intends to scrap four of its rigs.

Transocean intends to scrap the Deepwater Expedition, Transocean Legend, Transocean Rather, and GSF Arctic III. The company says that these rigs are classified as held for sale.
As a result, Transocean expects its first quarter 2015 results to include an estimated non-cash charge of $300 million to $325 million, net of taxes. Including these four rigs, Transocean has announced plans to scrap a total of 16 floaters.

According to Transocean, the total value of new contracts since the last report is approximately $9 million.
Sedco Express was awarded a one-well contract extension offshore Nigeria at a dayrate of $300,000 ($9 million estimated backlog).

Idle & stacked

High Specification Floater rig Henry Goodrich is idle.
Ultra-deepwater floaters Discoverer Spirit, GSF Jack Ryan, Deepwater Discovery, and Deepwater Pathfinder are stacked. The rigs were previously idle.
Estimated 2015 planned out-of-service time decreased by a net 102 days, mainly associated with the Henry Goodrich.
Transocean also informed that the company declared Force Majeure on February 24, 2015 for its midwater floater Transocean Amirante due to the deteriorating security situation in Libya. Eni subsequently terminated the contract and Transocean is contesting the termination.
The rig was under contract with Eni from December 2014 and the expiry date was set for Marc