It sounds like a scene from one of those sci-fi movies that suddenly moves into horror flick territory. Picture this: it’s the Caribbean and all around you are giant metal structures, eerily silent, deserted. Where did they come from? What are they doing here?
This is no movie, however…welcome to the world’s most expensive car park.
This part of the Gulf of Mexico has become a lay-by for deepwater drilling vessels.
It seems that, in a bid to save their machinery from an ignoble fate in the knacker’s yard, owners have taken to parking their hardware here, reputedly at a cost of $70,000 a day!
It’s a situation that highlights how the offshore industry that was set for an oil storm is having to deal instead with life in the doldrums.
Thankfully, our homegrown Oil & Gas industry is not seeing similar nightmare scenarios played out. And that’s because of a serious focus on asset integrity.
In an industry where companies must work with a finite resource in hostile environments – physically and financially – there are certainly challenges to be faced. These challenges increase when you consider the North Sea is a mature production area, where offshore infrastructures may be approaching or already have exceeded their originally designated lifespan.
Set this against a backdrop of rampant costs and a languishing oil price, you might think we’d have our own lot full of semi-abandoned rigs? Instead, in order to remain competitive, forward-thinking companies are looking to protect their long-term asset reliability – and they are finding the best answers in engineering, inspection and maintenance solutions.
The older the asset, the more work is required to maintain it in a condition that keeps it running safely and efficiently – that’s good news for the hard metal, but it’s also good news for the engineers, electricians and whole host of planners, project managers, health and safety experts and associated workers whose livelihoods rely on the rigs.
When it comes to the long-term protection of assets, the industry is also adopting strategies that help to motivate a process safety culture among workers: this means a need for health and safety inspectors, ongoing training programmes and, of course, trainers.
Integral to the new wave of training is the Minimum Industry Safety Training (MIST) course and, with this, have come online, interactive programmes offering opportunities to upskill and transfer skills to meet the Oil & Gas job requirements of the future.
Such technology not only requires experienced minds to help create the content, it needs software programmers and web developers to bring training to life and engage workers and job applicants.
Far from being a graveyard for rigs and ships, then, the Oil & Gas sector here is taking care of its own: and that should mean business well into the future.