Highlights of the Week

Subsea World News has put together a recap of the most interesting articles from the previous week (November 03 – November 09).

The safe installation of the 6,500 tonne structure by the deepwater construction vessel Aegir marks the beginning of the Project’s major installation campaign in the Browse Basin, offshore Western Australia.

Ichthys LNG Project Managing Director Louis Bonsaid the RSS is the largest subsea structure ever laid on the seabed. The completed RSS will be a physical, fixed support for flexible risers and dynamic umbilicals that connect subsea gathering systems to the Project’s semi-submersible central processing facility (CPF), currently under construction in Korea.

Nearly five years after the Deepwater Horizon explosion led to the release of roughly 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, scientists are still working to answer the question: Where did all the oil go?

During the 2010 crisis, some of the oil gushing from the seafloor appeared as slicks on the sea surface, while roughly half of it, scientists estimate, remained trapped in deep ocean plumes of mixed oil and gas, one of which was more than a mile wide, hundreds of feet high and extended for miles southwest of the broken riser pipe at the damaged Macondo well.

Bibby Offshore’s Houston-based division, Bibby Subsea, has announced the investment in a custom-built office and key appointment as a result of continued growth in the region.

The new premises, due for completion in November 2014, consist of a 6,300 sq. ft. office space and 2,000 sq. ft. warehouse and workshop area, which will allow for further team expansion. A recruitment drive is planned to increase the number of Bibby Subsea staff in the region by more than 70, both onshore and offshore, throughout 2015.

During a recent expedition to map earthquake faults in Monterey Bay, MBARI researchers discovered the wreck of a barge on the muddy seafloor in Monterey Canyon. The barge Umpqua II was about 1,700 meters (one mile) below the ocean surface.

Researchers first spotted the barge in sonar data from MBARI’s autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) D. Allen B., which is specially designed to map the seafloor.

Mermaid Maritime Public Company Limited announced that the Group has chartered in three additional vessels in the past month to take on new projects, on the back of strong demand for its services.

The Group has recently chartered-in the ‘Siem Daya 2′, an offshore subsea construction vessel to provide subsea cable laying installation support services in the Middle East for an upstream national oil and gas major.