ECONOMIC REPORT 2013
53
The future prospects of the subsea sector are
positive and, if companies’ growth forecasts
are achieved, over £11 billion of revenues
could be achieved by 2016. Future growth in
exports is anticipated to come primarily from
North and South America and Asia.
Well Services
The state of the well services’ sector is a
good indicator of current and future activity
on the UKCS, because of its involvement
in the exploration for and appraisal and
development of oil and gas reservoirs. In 2012,
companies delivering drilling, completion,
testing and maintenance services for oil
and gas wells generated the highest gross
revenue since records began in 1996, at
£1.9 billion. This higher than expected
revenue can be attributed to the growing
number of technically complex wells which
require the specialist skills and knowledge of
well services’ contractors.
This success has in turn boosted employment,
as the number of highly skilled jobs in the
UK supported by the sector also rose by ten
per cent in 2012 to 13,000, including 2,200
graduate engineers and 1,700 technicians.
The sector’s future prospects are good with
companies forecasting a further five per
cent increase in revenues in 2013. Technical
innovation is a priority for well services’
contractors with some companies spending
up to 90 per cent of their annual capital
investment on developing new technologies.
Indeed, their overall investment in future
capacity increased by 20 per cent in 2012
to £111 million, half of which was in capital
equipment, the other half in new technology.
Fabrication
Since the discovery of oil and gas on the
UKCS more than 40 years ago, the industry
has developed an indigenous fabrication
supply chain with expertise in the design
and construction of offshore platforms and a
broad range of associated structures.
Britain’s fabricators have been involved
in much of the construction of around 6.5
million tonnes of concrete and steel structures
installed on the UKCS to date. The sector has
demonstrated it has the capacity to design
and fabricate:
• Jackets (the steel substructures which
support platforms)
• Decks and modules comprising the
topsides facilities (above the jackets), such
as drilling, production, process, utilities
and accommodation units
• Flare booms and towers
• Subsea manifolds and pipeline bundles
While the requirement for very large,
integrated offshore platforms is no longer
as it was in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s,
there still remains substantial demand for
fabrication services, especially associated
with fields developed as subsea tie-backs to
existing production platforms. The existing
infrastructure often requires modification
and upgrading to accommodate new flows of
oil and/or gas (55 per cent of fields approved
in the last five years have been or will be
developed as subsea tie-backs).
An illustration of a pair of bridge linked,
offshore platforms is depicted in Figure 37
overleaf (note that it is not unusual for all the
topsides facilities to be accommodated in a
single, integrated platform).
