courtesy FMC Technologies

The skilled worker gap created by the oil industry’s rapid expansion since $20-a-barrel oil has reached the ROV business, just as remotely operated vehicles become part of the permanent kit aboard offshore service vessels.

“The most serious challenge among those we’re facing is that the numbers of ROV’s are increasing just as the expansion has forced a dilution of the workforce,” Oceaneering ROV manager, Espen Ingebretsen, told delegates of the Underwater Technology Conference 2008 in Bergen, western Norway.

The ROV business has become yet another barometer of oil industry health, while also marking a switch in focus. “The new frontier” for ROV deployment, Ingebretsen said, is in support of riserless light-well intervention, or RLWI.

Oceaneering ROV’s now sport dedicated ship-board storage and offloading tracks to the waves below. Specialist offshore intervention vessels have long represented untold hundreds of millions of dollars in avoided rig day rates, as the number of offshore well operations possible by ship increases. There are six RLWI ships in the North Sea.

Norway-based Island Offshore has recently put ROVs aboard its new-build offshore vessels with a resulting cut in idle time for its ships. In Norway, Oceaneering fields 55 ROVs with a an offshore staff of 370.

Tags: Oceaneering International