News / Lerwick coastel heralds latest oil invasion
LERWICK is preparing for another invasion of oil workers with the arrival of the 213 room ‘coastel’ Bibby Stockholm on Tuesday.
For the rest of this year the floating accommodation barge will house hundreds of workers employed by multinational oil field services firm Petrofac as they build the new £500 million gas plant at Sullom Voe for French oil giant Total.
More gas plant construction workers will be housed at the new 100 bed Moorfield Hotel being built from modules at Brae.
It is the second time in three years a Bibby coastel has graced Lerwick harbour after the Bibby Challenge arrived for the summer of 2010 to house workers carrying out maintenance at BP’s Sullom Voe oil terminal.
Lerwick harbour is already busy with offshore developments around Shetland as the energy industry opens up new oil and gas fields east, north and west of the islands in the biggest growth phase the region has seen for decades.
Harbourmaster Calum Grains said recent dredging work meant the harbour was able to attract the huge new offshore vessels needed for working in the more extreme environments being explored these days.
“The ships are bigger and working in harsher environments in deeper water that need larger pieces of equipment and that means they need to have the size of ship able to cope with that and the weather conditions they are getting,” he said.
“We are able to attract these big support ships because of our deep water quayside and this will be very important for the next few years.”
The next 10 months will see large gas plant modules being landed at Holmsgarth from where they have already started to be transshipped by Mammoet by barge to Sullom Voe.
Meanwhile enormous Subsea 7 support vessels have become a regular sight in Lerwick as they become involved in installing the subsea infrastructure for the Laggan-Tormore gas field being opened up by Total.
This year the harbour is building a 75 metre extension to its 100 metre deep water quay at Greenhead to help handle the amount of offshore business expected over the next few years.
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