Floating Production: Brighter Times Ahead
Forecast: Capital Expenditure on Floating Production Units by Year of Installation ($m) Source: The World Floating Production Report 2009-2013 – Douglas-Westwood Ltd
Despite an estimated $10 billion of expected orders failing to materialise as the global economy derailed in 2008 and 2009, the floating production sector is expected to recover in 2010 and over the period 2009 to 2013 a total of $46 billion is forecast to be spent on floating production systems installed worldwide. These are amongst the forecasts in a new report launched last week by energy analysts Douglas-Westwood.
Announcing the results of the study, Douglas-Westwood management stated that, “the study stated that the turbulent nature of energy and financial markets that developed in the second half of 2008 has persisted into 2009 and has had a dramatic impact on the FPS sector. E&P companies are reining in expenditure and delaying projects as they respond to lower commodity prices, constrained cash flows and to challenges faced in the global credit market. While the situation has improved somewhat in recent months. the current economic climate remains difficult. The oilfield equipment and services sector is inherently a capital and asset-intensive industry and its reliance on debt markets, to fuel expansion, has meant that many companies are feeling the effects of global financial constraints.”
“The impact on this sector has been massive and to see $10.4 billion of anticipated orders this time last year for 2008/9 not materialise is unprecedented. However, we are convinced that the long-term fundamentals for the sector are strong: the need to exploit reserves in deep waters, marginal fields and remote locations will undoubtedly increase as the offshore industry matures and floating production systems are a key enabling technology in these areas.”
“We forecast that a total of 121 floating production systems will be installed worldwide over the 2009-2013 period. FPSOs will account for the largest proportion of these installations (94 vessels), along with 12 TLPs, 11 FPSSs and four spars. With this level of demand, global capex in the FPS sector is forecast at $45.8 billion. Of this overall market value, the world’s three major deepwater regions – Africa, North America and Latin America – account for 59% of forecast global FPS capex.
“Our analysis of the leading operators in the FPS sector suggests that Brazil’s national oil company, Petrobras, was the biggest spender on FPS systems over the 2004-2008 period. Petrobras is also expected to continue this lead over the forecast period, although ‘super-majors’ such as Total, Chevron, Shell and BP are all expected to commit to significant FPS expenditure over the coming five years. The sector’s top ten operators by expenditure account for 55% of the installations and 68% of the capex forecast worldwide for the 2009-2013 period.”
A forerunner of future Russian frigates?
On June 19, the frigate Yaroslav Mudry, a long-awaited addition to the Russian Navy, began its maiden cruise on the Baltic Sea.
The Project 11540 ship was laid down in 1990 as the prototype ship of the series. However, in 1994 work on the Yaroslav Mudry was halted, even though the ship was 75% complete. Construction was not resumed until 2002 and the ship had to be practically re-built to meet the latest technological advances.
The Yaroslav Mudry is a multi-purpose vessel intended to engage surface and sub-surface targets, and is equipped with powerful air defence systems. The ship has a full displacement of 4,250 tons, a length of 130 meters, a beam of 15.6 meters and a draft of 8.35 meters. Its sailing range is 2,900 miles and it is manned by a crew of 210, including 35 officers.
The frigate is equipped with Uran anti-ship missiles, a Kinzhal surface-to-air missile system, a Vodopad anti-submarine missile system, rocket-assisted bomb throwers, one 100mm all-purpose artillery gun, two Kortik anti-aircraft rocket artillery systems, and two AK-630 six-barreled Gatling guns.
Project 11540, as embodied in the Yaroslav Mudry, is a further development of the Soviet 1135 Project, which spawned a large number of escort ships for the Navy and the KGB’s coast guard. Under a program adopted in the late 1980s, the Soviet Navy and coast guard service were to have received over 70 ships from the project over a 20 year period, but the collapse of the Soviet Union put an end to these plans.
The current status of frigates in the Russian Navy is changed. As in other countries, they have developed into fighting vessels capable of fulfilling missions both independently and within a formation. This philosophical change means an increase in combat power, which has been achieved by installing anti-ship missiles on new and upgraded ships.
The Yaroslav Mudry and other escort ships making up the Russian Navy are now testing technological decisions which will be used on new vessels of the same class – Project 22350 frigates. During the next five years it is planned to start building a series of ships of this type. All in all, the Russian Navy expects to take delivery of up to 20 frigates in the next 15-20 years.
Fisheries management shrouded in secrecy, corrupted by politics: study
Fisheries management in most of the world’s coastal states is shrouded in secrecy and corrupted by political pressures, according to a new study that says stock survival hinges on more transparent conservation efforts. The international team of scientists found that only seven per cent of countries bordering water conduct rigorous scientific assessments in drafting their fisheries policies.
The study was published in this week’s issue of PLoS Biology and provides the first global evaluation of how management practices influence fisheries’ sustainability. The study assessed the effectiveness of the world’s fisheries management regimes using evaluations from nearly 1,200 fisheries experts, analyzing these in combination with data on the sustainability of fisheries catches. The Faroe Islands and the Falkland Islands had the best overall rankings, while African and South Pacific countries had some of the worst.
According to the most recent report on the status of the world’s fisheries by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, fisheries supply at least 15% of the animal protein consumed by humans, provide direct and indirect employment for nearly 200 million people worldwide and generate $US85 billion annually. “The world’s fisheries are one of the most important natural assets to humankind,” says lead author Camilo Mora, a Colombian researcher at Dalhousie University and the University of California San Diego. “Unfortunately, our use of the world’s fisheries has been excessive and has led to the decline or collapse of many stocks.”
“The consequences of overexploiting the world’s fisheries are a concern not only for food security and socio-economic development but for ocean ecosystems,” says Boris Worm, a professor at Dalhousie University and co-author of the paper. “We now recognize that overfishing can also lead to the erosion of biodiversity and ecosystem productivity.”
“The different socioeconomic and ecological consequences associated with declining fish stocks are an international concern and several initiatives have been put forward to ensure that countries improve the way they use their marine resources,” explains Mora. “Some of these initiatives include the United Nations Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Although these initiatives have been endorsed by most governments, a global assessment on the extent to which these ideals are actually implemented and effective remains lacking.”
Mora and his colleagues analyzed a set of attributes upon which country-level fisheries could be evaluated. They pinpointed six parameters, including the scientific quality of management recommendations, the transparency of converting recommendations into policy, the enforcement of policies, the influence of subsidies, fishing effort, and the extent of fishing by foreign entities. The results of the study show that wealthier countries, though they have predominantly better science and enforcement capabilities, face the negative repercussions of excessive subsidies and larger fishing capacity, which have resulted largely from increased modernization of national fleets.
In contrast, poorer countries largely lacked robust science and enforcement capabilities and although these nations have less fishing capacity nationally, they disproportionally sold fishing rights to nations that did. The study showed that in 33% of the coastal states classified as low-income (commonly countries in Africa and Oceania) most fishing is carried out by foreign fleets from either the European Union, South Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan or the United States.
The only attribute in which poorer and wealthier countries overlapped significantly was their limited ability to convert scientific recommendations into policy. “Transparent policy-making is at the centre of the entire process,” explains co-author Marta Coll, at the Institut de Ciènces del Mar in Spain. “If this is heavily influenced by political pressures or corruption, it is unlikely that good scientific advice will ever be translated into proper regulations. Similarly, authoritarianism in this process is likely to reduce compliance with the resulting policies.”
“This study provided us with a look at both sides of the coin,” says Andrew Rosenberg at the University of New Hampshire, who was not involved in the study. “On one hand, it reminds us of the difficult challenges facing fisheries management globally in protecting critical natural resources from overexploitation. On the other hand it delivers a message of hope that when policy-making is transparent, participatory, and based on science, things can improve.”
US Navy was tracking Chinese sub
Earlier this week, the US Navy Times reported that defense officials confirmed the destroyer John S. McCain was tracking the submarine that struck its towed sonar array June 10 in the South China Sea off the Philippines.
The officials, who are familiar with the incident but were not authorized to speak on the subject, confirmed the array, which trailed up to a mile behind the ship, was hit by a Chinese navy submarine. Days after the incident, Chinese officials acknowledged that the submarine was theirs. The McCain crew was able to retrieve the sonar array, which was damaged, although it’s not clear whether it was retrieved intact.
The Associated Press reported that the collision took place 144 miles from Subic Bay, potentially placing it in the Mindoro Strait. The collision has been described as “inadvertent” by defense officials. Beyond that, little has been revealed about the circumstances.
The US Navy by practice does not discuss operations that could reveal force capabilities, but observers have been looking for answers in this case because of the proximity of the submarine to a U.S. warship. Towed sonar arrays are dragged on a cable about a mile long, with the sensors placed toward the end of the line to avoid absorbing sound from the host ship.
The collision follows recent incidents in the region in which Chinese vessels harassed two U.S. surveillance ships that specialize in undersea listening, using towed sonar. News reports at the time said the harassing vessels were trying to snag the trailing U.S. sensor gear.
As recounted in the bestseller “Blind Man’s Bluff,” in October 1983 in the Atlantic, a Soviet sub accidentally snagged a sonar array being towed by a U.S. frigate, detached the cable, got tangled in it and was forced to surface. “No sub skipper in his right mind would use his sub to damage a towed array,” said Jan van Tol, a former destroyer captain who hunted subs in the South China Sea. “It’s extremely unlikely to be deliberate. You don’t want an array caught in your screw.” He said those waters are very noisy, making antisubmarine warfare particularly dicey. “It’s possible it was a blind/blind situation and both sides were surprised,” he said.
Most observers resist putting this incident into a pattern of what are thought to be calibrated displays of growing Chinese military prowess, such as the 2006 detection of a Chinese sub in torpedo range of the Kitty Hawk Carrier Strike Group. More likely, the sub’s intent was to stalk the McCain, test its detection abilities, get proof of its proximity and slink away unseen and unheard, said John Arquilla, author and professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School. To have pulled that off would have been a “perfect success,” he said.
Instead, they got caught.
“We should hear alarm bells go off every time we have incidents of this sort,” Arquilla said. “What I see in this pattern of incidents is a growing capability of the Chinese to use stealthy navy assets to get close to our larger and more visible ships.”
Marport Completes Successful Sea Trials of Multimode Sonar Transceiver
During the past week in the waters of Puget Sound near Seattle, Marport engineers completed successful sea trials of its Multimode Sonar Transceiver.
The broadband, Multimode Sonar Transceiver is based on Marport’s Software Defined Sonar technology.
A single transceiver is capable of providing the following functional capabilities via dynamic software reconfiguration:
- single beam shallow water survey sounder,
- single beam deep water survey sounder,
- multibeam echo sounder,
- side scan sonar,
- doppler current profiler,
- doppler velocity log,
- sound velocity profiler, and
- sub bottom profiler (conventional and parametric).
Other features of the transceiver include:
- Dynamic Broadband Tuning - 1 kHz to 1 Mhz
- Shallow Water to Full Ocean Depth – 0.35 to 10,000m
- User Defined Frequency, Pulse Length, Modulation
- Advanced Algorithms for Bottom Tracking, Second Layer Detection and Seabed Classification
- Support for 3rd Party Transducers and Software
- User Defined Frequency, Pulse Length, Modulation
- Transceiver is MIL-SPEC Type Approved
- Simultaneous Support for 4 Different Transducers/Operating Frequencies
- Embedded Intel Celeron Dual Core Processor
- Integrated Linux RTOS
- Solid State Hard Drive for Data Logging
- Interfaces include CANBus, Giga-Ethernet, USB, RS232/422, Bluetooth, WiFi
- Compact, Lightweight, and Power Efficient
- Excellent Price / Performance Value
The completely watertight, cylindrical transceiver has a diameter of 20 cm and is rated to 5,000m depth (for AUV operations).
Preliminary technical specs are as follows:
Transmitter
- Modulation fully programmable – CW, FM, Phase
- Pulse length fully programmable
- Broadband Frequency: 1 kHz to 1 MHz
- Output power: up to 4kW on 20 Ohms
- Full IQ 16 bit pilot signal
Receiver
- Full IQ 24 bit data – up to 160 dB dynamic
- SNR: 126dB at 38kHz, 120dB at 600kHz
- Different adaptive gains for water column and bottom simultaneously
Marport will be carrying out additional sea trials over the summer months and plans commercial availability for the Multimode Sonar Transceiver by early September, 2009.
Naval Watchdog Says Pirates Moving Their Focus
This map shows all the piracy and armed robbery incidents reported to the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre during 2009.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – This past week a maritime watchdog warned seafarers that Somali pirates were targeting ships at the southern end of the Red Sea and off Oman due bad weather off Somalia to the absence of naval warships.
“The two new areas are at Bab al Mandab, southern Red Sea, and the Arabian Sea, off Oman,” said Noel Choong, head of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur.
Choong said the IMB had recorded eight attacks in the past two weeks in the two areas, adding that pirates were staging raids under the cover of darkness.
“Pirates are expanding their attacks from the Gulf of Aden. Bad weather conditions in the east coast of Somalia due to the southwest monsoon are pushing them to launch attacks in the two new areas,” he said.
Choong also said the international flotilla of warships was concentrated in the Gulf of Aden, forcing pirates to expand their attack areas to ensure successful hijackings.
The world’s naval powers have deployed dozens of warships to the lawless waters off Somalia over the past year to curb attacks by pirates threatening one of the world’s busiest maritime trade routes.
At the last count, 14 ships were still being held by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean, together with more than 200 seamen, almost a quarter of them Filipinos.
New Russian spy-sub operates in northern waters
The Barents Observer is reporting that Russia’s top-secret special purpose submarine, B-90 Sarov, is reportedly operating in northern waters from the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet bases on the Kola Peninsula.
The first details about the brand new spy-sub were revealed in 2007 when a city official in the city of Sarov inadvertently posted detailed information about the sub’s existence on the city’s own website. That info was quickly removed, but too late to stop the info from being circulated. Afterwards, both the Russian navy and the defence ministry denied the existence of the new submarine, only named by its project number 20120.
According to other Russian news services, the submarine is a technology demonstrator. Sarov was once the secretive closed city Arzamas-16, also known as the Russian Los Alamos for its role in the Soviet nuclear weapons program.
The spy-sub B-90 Sarov was built in Nizhny Novgorod, but transported via Russia’s inner waterways, to the Sevmash yard in Severodvinsk where it was equipped with its engines and nuclear reactor. During the Cold War, the Northern fleet operated several special purpose submarines aimed for underwater spy operations.
One of the unique features of the spy-sub is its ultra-small nuclear reactor aimed to charge the subs batteries, so it can stay much longer underwater, totally silent, than normal diesel-electric submarines. This is most important for a submarine aimed for spy-voyages not to be detected by foreign vessels, submarines, or detection systems on the seabed.
Though nuclear submarine construction is well-established at the Sevmash shipyards in Severodvinsk, Sarov could be a site for further research into the use of radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs). RTGs use the heat of radioactive decay from radioisotopes like plutonium-238 and strontium-90 to generate electricity. They are much simpler than full-fledged naval reactors and have been used to power remote lighthouses and weather stations as well as deep space probes unable to rely on solar energy.
Air Independent Propulsion (AIP) is a term that encompasses technologies which allow a submarine to operate without the need to surface or use a snorkel to access atmospheric oxygen. A successful AIP uniquely suited to the Russian defense industry is a potentially significant development for the next generation of Russian patrol subs – both for domestic coastal defense and export abroad.
The specifications of the submarine are:
Length: 72.6m
Width: 9.9m
Draught: 7m
Displacement: 2300/3950 tons
Diving depth: 300m
Speed: 10/17 kts
Endurance: 45 days
The submarine requires a crew of 52.
Marport’s Software Defined Sonar® Profiled By Marine Technology Reporter
Marport Software Defined Sonar® has been profiled in the June 2009 Marine Technology Reporter’s Future Tech edition.
Marine Technology Reporter is the world’s largest audited circulation magazine to cover the marine technology market. It’s become a highly regarded industry publication and acts as a resource guide for companies, government agencies, research institutions and universities seeking product and service providers.
Marport’s Software Defined Sonar (SDS) technology replaces conventional, hardware-centric sonar systems with one common platform composed of programmable components that are controlled by software. With SDS technology, a single hardware platform handles many different sonar functions – the platform is easily reconfigured to change its specific function as needed. The technology improves sonar functionality, enhances signal processing and substantially reduces costs – all while replacing racks of legacy sonar equipment.
The June 2009 edition of MTR can be accessed at: http://dwp.marinelink.com/pubs/nwm/mt/200906/
Iceland’s Marine Research Institute Recommends 150,000 Tonne Cod Quota
Iceland’s influential Marine Research Institute has recommended an unchanged cod catch quota of 150,000 tonnes for the 2009-10 fishing year which starts at the end of August. The Reykjavik government usually accepts the MRI’s figures.
This is 30,000 tonnes higher than the figure set at this time last year, but the quota was raised in January following new scientific information from the MRI which showed that cod stocks were a lot higher than first thought.
The MRI has said that the allowable cod catch is likely to remain around the 150,000 to 160,000 ton mark for the next three or four years which is good news for the seafood processing industry because it means it can plan ahead with some degree of price certainty.
When the cod quota was slashed by 50,000 tonnes two years ago both wholesale and retail prices throughout Europe moved up sharply, and caused many seafood companies to move away from cod to cheaper varieties such as pollack. But now a large part of that differential has been restored.
The MRI is basing is recommendation on the results of its spring rally which monitors cod stocks around Iceland. They show that the basic index for cod is nine per cent higher than in 2008.This is the second successive year that cod stocks have shown signs of recovery and the first estimate of the 2008 year class cod indicates that it is strong. Haddock catches, however, may face a small cut when the quotas are finalised this month.
Russia Will Protect Interests in Arctic: Official
Russia will defend its interests in the Arctic amid the race for the region’s energy riches, a Russian official said June 10, while dismissing the possibility of open conflict over the far north.
“We will protect our interests in the future, but I don’t see that it will lead to a conflict in the near future,” said Artur Chilingarov, the Kremlin’s representative for international cooperation in the Arctic and Antarctic.
“We will build up our scientific, economic and research interest in the Arctic, but not our military,” he told reporters in Moscow.
Moscow raised the stakes this year in the diplomatic tug-of-war with the four other Arctic states – Canada, Denmark, Norway and the United States – by declaring plans to station more troops in Russia’s northern regions by 2020.
Chilingarov, a celebrated polar explorer and lawmaker, himself spearheaded a highly-publicized expedition in 2007 to plant the Russian flag on the Arctic seabed in a not-too-subtle demonstration of Russia’s territorial ambitions.
Interest in the economic exploitation of the Arctic has increased in recent years as the melting of the polar icecap means easier access to oil reserves. The Arctic likely holds 30 percent of the world’s untapped gas and about 13 percent of its oil, a U.S. geological survey published last month in Science magazine said.
“Everyone has their own national interests. I’ll say again that Russia’s interests in the far north, in the Arctic Ocean, are tied to the region’s economic potential for Russia: gas, oil, gold, diamonds,” Chilingarov said.
“These are all in Russia’s economic interests and we will protect them.”
Moscow has lodged a claim with a United Nations commission on a huge swath of Arctic seabed, arguing that the underwater Lomonosov Ridge, a geological structure which stretches across much of the pole, is a continuation of its continental shelf.
