Interview: Maersk Supply growing in Aberdeen despite expected company sale

OET: While you’ve been active in the spot market, there is also a longer-term work in the UK. Can you talk about involvement in the Culzean development? 

Worth noting, Maersk Supply Service won work from Maersk Oil the operator of the field. Maersk Oil is now under Total.

First, can you tell us more about how you got the Culzean job in the first place, given that it came from your sister company? How does this work, is there some kind of a conflict of interest there? Did you have to bid and offer the lowest price, how does it work?

Harris: Maersk Oil are partners in Culzean and so the original work scope was awarded to Subsea 7. And work scope that we’ve undertaken is the tow of the FSO, the pre-installation of moorings anchors and chains. Once the FSO comes to the site, we’ll hook up all the mooring system with our vessels.

All of those operations were undertaken under a Subsea 7 contract. But they were all third party vessels that Subsea 7 was using because it’s not their core tonnage.

We approached Maersk Oil and said it would be a better solution to go directly to anchor handling companies who specialize in this type of operations. They agreed and initiated a tendering process, we bid for the work, and we won it competitively.

Although as you say that perhaps with a sister company which is on paper true, because they have partners, we probably underwent more scrutiny, than we would’ve done if it was an everyday tendering situation.

We approached Maersk Oil and said it would be a better solution to go directly to anchor handling companies who specialize in this type of operations.

Because we had to justify to the partners that they weren’t just handing the money over internally, but that this was a fair and transparent bidding process and that we were, in fact, better and cheaper solution and a robust technical solution for the project.

Through that process, we negotiated the contract. Having spent 25 years negotiating contracts, Maersk Oil did us no favors internally but that’s where the market is.

We have a contract. The first phase of that was undertaken last year (2017).

We did boulder clearance for the chain lay down corridors and we undertook anchor installation installing all the mooring legs, lower sections and the anchors, which we pretensioned to over 800 hundred tons, which is a record in the North Sea.

This year we’re just preparing to collect the FSO from Singapore, and we’ll have a fleet of four vessels in the tow – three will be involved in the tow and one escort vessels through that route via Cape of Good Hope and up to the North Sea whereupon we’ll hook up the vessel with the mooring system.

OET: How long it’s going to take to tow the FSO from Singapore to the final location?

Harris: It’s going to be roughly 70 days.

OET: When is this going to happen, the tow? Can you provide a rough timeline?

Harris: We’re waiting for official notification under our contract from the Culzean operator. We expect to be in the North Sea by August.

OET: Given that Total is now the owner, or, has taken over Maersk Oil in March. Does this change anything for you or is this just work as usual under Culzean?

Harris: It’s early days for us, but the contract is the governing document between the two parties and if there are any changes to be made, then we will be notified through the contract.

Essentially, the work scope isn’t going to change, the timing isn’t going to change, the only thing that may change are some HSE changes through Total’s preferred HSE system, but it will only be minor semantics. the HSE standards of Maersk Oil and Total are both very high, and Maersk Supply Service complies with them very well. Generally, I don’t expect anything to impact the project at all.

OET: While Culzean is obviously a big part of the increase of Maersk Supply Service’s local workforce in the Aberdeen, this is not the only reason. There’s also the Janice decommissioning project?

Harris: That’s right. We’re undertaking the Janice, James, and Leadon fields decommissioning at the moment. We had a big campaign on that last year, and this year we’re working on the Leadon field and we’re preparing for a recovery of the bundle towheads.

These are around 300t offshore lifts, and this will be the first time that significant towheads of this size have been recovered.

OET: What are you going to be using for this operation?

Harris: This will involve our new I-Class vessels, the Stingrays, with a 400t offshore crane and 1,850m square back deck. We will do subsea cuts to the bundle, using a diamond wire, and we will recover the towheads to the deck and then take them to shore.

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