Page 43: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (April 2006)

April 2006 43

Africa. The vessel is equipped to install any of the various offshore systems designed and built by the SBM Group, including floating production, storage and offloading units (FPSOs), catenary anchor leg mooring buoys (CALMs), spread moorings, tension-leg plat- forms(TLPs) and semi-submersible units in deep and ultra-deep waters, as well as undertaking subsea work associ- ated with the development and mainte- nance of deepwater fields.

Aker Yards' recently-secured contract from DOF for two large construction ships underscored both the group's increasingly prolific output of offshore support vessel tonnage, and the capabil- ity of Norwegian builders to meet the new challenges posed by the offshore industry's shift to deeper waters and requirement for more versatile and more complex support ships. The extensive construction program in hand at Aker's yards on the Norwegian west coast and abroad demonstrates an eclectic approach, since it involves designs from Vik-Sandvik,

Skipsteknisk, Marin Teknikk and Rolls-

Royce Marine's UT-Design, as well as

Aker's own project division. DOF's order for construction vessels of 153-m and 138-m in length, respectively, will showcase in-house design skills. The larger ship for the owner's DOFCON subsidiary will use Aker's OSCV 06L blueprints, and feature a 400-ton off- shore crane, DP Class III, ice class and an 18-knot maximum speed, while the other, somewhat shorter newbuild will be of the OSCV 06 design, with a 250- ton crane and DP Class III categoriza- tion.

While the bigger ship will come from the group's Soviknes premises, the

OSCV 06 has been assigned to Aker

Yards in Brazil, providing the interna- tionally re-emergent Brazilian ship- building industry with a milestone refer- ence in the offshore construction vessel field. Ulsteinvik-based Island Offshore is a comparatively young company which has emerged as one of the cham- pions of innovative support ship design, responding both to its own reading of the market's unfolding requirements and to the needs of particularly discerning charterers such as Norwegian energy group Statoil. Current investment includes a number of vessels from Aker

Yards employing Rolls-Royce UT designs and Det Norske Veritas' tough- est environmental criteria, expressed in the society's Clean Design (CD) class notation criteria.

Island Offshore's UT767CD-type, 8,200-dwt newbuild Island Wellserver is scheduled to be delivered from Aker's

Langsten yard in January 2008, and will take over responsibility for a contract with Statoil to provide light well inter- vention services on the Norwegian con- tinental shelf.

Her range of tasks will include pro- duction logging, plugging and gauging operations, perforation, re-perforation and downhole mechanical work, and

ROV operations. Among the tools of the trade embodied in the diesel-electric

Island Wellserver will be a module han-

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Aker OSCV 06L design of offshore construction vessel just ordered by DOFCON from Aker Yards.

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