An Armada of Offshore Support Vessels

Norwegian petroleum and natural gas exports today account for over half of their total export earnings and are worth in excess of 1,500 million kroner per year. The output of natural gas in particular is growing at an annual rate of 15% with the majority exported to the United Kingdom and Holland. This offshore deep water industry dominates their national economy, supervised by the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate. The Ulsteinvik shipyards near Alesund in Norway of Ulstein Verft A/S and Kleven Verft A/S have built more than three hundred offshore support vessels of all types during the last forty years for the offshore oil industry. An equal number of offshore support vessels have been built during the same period by yards in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Russia and the Far East. There are, or have been, a multitude of Norwegian offshore support vessel operators, including Eidesvik Offshore, Fugro Offshore, DOF Offshore, Solstad Offshore, Farstad Offshore, Havila Offshore, Gulf Offshore Norge, TFDS Offshore and BOA Offshore.

Subsea And Offshore Work

The complex types of work that offshore vessels are sometimes called upon to complete can take several months or years to commissioning, and charter parties reflect this with charters ranging from one month to five years with purchase options at the end of long charters. The platform supply vessel (PSV) carries foodstuffs, container packed stores, engineering equipment, drill pipes, casing and other long cylindrical items to oil rigs and platforms. Internal tanks carry potable water, fuel oil, drilling water, liquid mud and brine. The anchor handling tug and supply vessel (AHTS) today operates in more remote locations in deeper waters and increasingly hostile climates. They have a high bollard pull and winch capacity of between 150 to 300 tonnes in order to lift and reposition the huge anchors of semi-submersible rigs and pipelayers. Other more usual work comprises:-

• Installation of flexible flowlines, risers and umbilicals to FPSOs, buoys and barges
• Diving services
• Pipelaying to other nearby oilfields or shore refineries
• Pipe transportation and coating
• Cablelaying
• Subsea maintenance work
• Platform and supply vessel duties
• Field survey and support services
• Special projects
• Trenching/ploughing operations
• Heavy subsea construction
• ROV work
• Anchor Handling Towage of Rigs
• Seabed Logging
• Transportation of heavy oilfield equipment
• Wind Farm installation work
• Steelwork seabed foundations with multiple well connections

Siem Offshore Companies

One of the bigger offshore fleets today has been owned by companies associated with Kristian Siem, such as Norex Offshore A/S, DSND Offshore A/S, Siem Offshore Inc. and Subsea 7 Inc. The types of vessel include saturation deep diving vessels, oil well stimulation vessels, anchor handling tugs, offshore platform and oil rig supply vessels, pipe carriers, pipe layers, cablelayers, geophysical survey ships, oil research vessels, crane barges, oil well construction heavy lift vessels, and many other types of oilfield support vessels.

Kristian Siem is a Norwegian shipowner and entrepreneur, and a deal maker in the shipping and offshore oil industries since 1972. He was born on 7th February 1949 in Norway as the son of Martin Siem (1915-1996) and Inger Aagard (1916-2012). His father worked all of his life in the shipping and shipbuilding industries, particularly with Aker Yards of Norway, and was one of the closest associates of Oslo shipowner Fred. Olsen. Kristian Siem completed his education in 1972 at the Oslo Institute of Business Administration with a degree in Business Economics, and followed his father into the many worldwide shipping trades of the Fred. Olsen business. After six years experience in the dynamic Norwegian offshore oil environment with Olsen, he branched out to work for himself in the Norwegian offshore drilling industry, purchasing a semi-submersible oil rig cheaply in Houston from Viking Offshore at the bottom of the market with Siem family money. The rig earned good charter contract hire payments with oil majors, and then jack up rigs were also purchased and earned equally good daily contract hire sums with oil majors. In 1979, this highly profitable offshore business was renamed as a Siem family company, Norex Corporation Ltd., and a three year old drillship, Iro Frigg of 5,547 grt, named after the Frigg field in the North Sea and built at Singapore in 1976, was purchased during the year.

Iro Frigg had three sister drillships, one of which was owned by Atlantic Drilling Ltd. from February 1980, controlled by Ben Line of Leith for several years during their long spell of rig and drillship owning. Iro Frigg and her sisters had tall manually operated drill towers and derricks ‘midships with a large helipad aft. They drilled wells worldwide with Iro Frigg employed on a lucrative two year contract to Phillips Petroleum Company off the Ivory Coast from 1981. In July of that year, Common Brothers of Newcastle upon Tyne, in a similar diversification move away from traditional shipowning as Ben Line, purchased an 80% holding in Iro Frigg. This was paid for, not by cash, but by almost half of the shareholding of Common Brothers PLC, with Kristian Siem then obtaining control of this long established shipowner by purchasing small parcels of shares from directors and existing shareholders. He joined the Board of Common Brothers as Deputy Managing Director, and after the retirement of two Common Brothers family directors, was made Chairman and Chief Executive at the end of 1984. The name of Common Brothers PLC was then changed to Norex PLC on 28th August 1987, a Siem holding company owning oil and gas tankers, minority shareholdings in oil and gas companies including Zapata Oil and Gas of the U.S.A., and the wholly Siem owned Norex Drilling A/S and Norex Offshore A/S. Ten years later in 1997, Norex profits had topped £33 million, and were up 70% over the previous year.

Further Siem Offshore Acquisitions

In 1993, Kristian Siem purchased a large minority shareholding of around 44% in DSND Offshore A/S of Norway, an offshore company of the former ferry company Det Sondenfjeldske D/S, founded in 1853 in Oslo and Kristiansand for Oslo to Hull and Oslo to Hamburg services. It owned ferries and coastal craft until 1964 when the passenger service between Oslo and Hamburg was closed down. The last two passenger ferries were the engines ‘midships Kong Ring of 1,349 grt and built by the Moss Verft and Dokk yard in 1950, and the engines aft Kong Inge of 1,163 grt and built in 1953 by the Norrkoping Verft yard, with both powered by Nyquist & Holm diesels to give a service speed of twelve knots.

Det Sondenfjeldske D/S then became a marine investment company with investments made in the Norwegian offshore oil industry, and six specialist oil related vessels owned in Autumn of 1995. Two of these were employed in offshore construction, two in well maintenance, and two in drilling oil wells. DSND Offshore A/S was operating in 1998 the platform and oil rig supply vessels DSND Buccaneer and DSND Stephaniturm, survey ship DSND Surveyor, diving support ship Aquamarine, oil well stimulation vessels Big Orange XVIII and Bucentaur, oil well maintenance vessels Botnica, Nordica and Fennica (Finnish icebreakers leased for eight months summer work in the North Sea), the pipelayer and crane ship Maxita equipped with a 600 tonne heavy lift crane, and the oil survey and research ship Norskald. The latter vessel was the former yellow hulled drillship Wimpey Sealab, with a red and white central drill tower and dynamic positioning system, and employed on contract by the National Coal Board to drill for coal off the coastline of Durham. She had been completed as Elizabeth Bowater as a newsprint carrier for Bowater Shipping in 1958 by the Caledon yard at Dundee.

The twin funnelled converted ro-ro cargo ship Kommandor 3000 was also in the DSND fleet in 1999 as a pipelayer and flexlayer as well as a construction vessel, equipped with a 200 tonne capacity ‘A’ frame, two smaller cranes, three powered carousels for flexible pipe, and two moonpools and two ROVs. She was completed in March 1984 at Niteroi in Brazil by the CCN yard, and began her offshore career in 1998 as a diving support vessel and was then lengthened and widened a year later at the Viktor Lenac yard in Croatia to undertake more challenging offshore roles. In Millennium year, the diving support vessels DSND Pelican (ex Seaway Pelican and now Seven Pelican) and DSND Mayo were purchased for the fleet, the latter ship had been built by the Dannebrog Verft yard in Aarhus in June 1987 as Stena Mayo in the same offshore role. She arrived in the Tyne in January 2003 for lay up, and was sold a year later to Petroleum Marine Services (PMS) and renamed PMS Mayo. Oil rigs, drilling ships and FPSOs (Floating Production, Storage and Offloading) are often towed in and out of the Tyne and Tees by powerful anchor handling tugs and supply vessels to the North Sea oilfields or to their destinations in oilfields across the world.

Formation Of Subsea 7 Inc.

On 18th October 2001, DSND Offshore A/S began discussions with American oil services company Halliburton with a view to combining their activities in subsea construction and services. A few months later on 23rd May 2002, a joint venture company, Subsea 7 Inc., was formed and registered in the Cayman Islands for worldwide oil services. Two years later, Subsea 7 Inc. had a fleet of eighteen owned and chartered offshore vessels and pipelayers, e.g. the chartered well stimulation vessel Subsea Viking 7,401/99 of Eidesvik Offshore, at its disposal for worldwide offshore support. The Isle of Man registered Lochnagar of 6,409 grt was built back in 1982 at Ulsteinvik as platform supply vessel Stad Ulstein, but was lengthened, widened and converted in 1998 into a pipelayer with an ‘A’ frame at her stern and pipe storage capacity of 1,850 feet. She was upgraded in a Brazilian shipyard in 2004 for a long term Subsea 7 charter with Petrobras in their deep water Campos field off Brazil.

The 50% Halliburton share was then acquired on 15th November 2004, with Subsea 7 publicly listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange in August 2005. A major reorganisation of the oil services industry followed later that year in two new initiatives. The first initiative saw Kristian Siem spinning off a new offshore services company from Subsea 7 Inc as Siem Offshore Inc. and listed on the Oslo Bourse on 12th August 2005, having been set up as Siem Supply Inc. on 12th October 2004 as a wholly owned subsidiary of Subsea 7 Inc. A shareholder in Subsea 7 Inc. received one share in Siem Offshore Inc. for every share held in Subsea 7 Inc.

The second initiative concerned Stolt-Nielsen Seaways, which had begun North Sea oil operations in 1970 and then had acquired the French owned Comex Services in 1989 to become Stolt Comex Services, and after further acquisitions during Millennium year had been renamed Stolt Offshore with yellow hulled offshore vessels. A reorganisation to refocus the company after many acquisitions culminated in renaming it as Acergy S.A. in 2005 with red hulled offshore vessels. A full merger worth $5.4 billion at the beginning of 2011 was made with Subsea 7 Inc. as Subsea 7 S.A., retaining Acergy’s Luxembourg domicile and London operational headquarters. The large Subsea 7 offshore oil fleet then flew the white Subsea 7 houseflag showing a stylised ‘7’ instead of the Acergy houseflag. Kristian Siem was Chairman of the new company with Jean Cahuzac as Managing Director, both having held the same roles at Subsea 7 and Acergy respectively.

Acergy had a number of former Stolt Comex Seaways vessels in its fleet as oil flexible pipeline layers that had previously operated as cablelayers, including the sisters Acergy Eagle (ex Seaway Eagle) and Acergy Discovery (ex Discovery), completed by the Boelwerf N.V. yard at Temse during 1990/94. Acergy Condor (ex Seaway Condor) was completed by the Nobiskrug Werft yard at Rendsburg in 1982 as a diving maintenance and fire fighting ship and was converted two years later into a flexible pipelayer and cablelayer equipped with a 70 tonne heavy lift crane. She was upgraded in 1999 by Cammell, Laird & Co. Ltd. to carry three thousand tonnes of flexible pipeline plus eight reels on deck, and was lengthened by thirty metres to hold an extra sixty tonne heavy lift crane and a 1,600 tonne powered carousel, with also a 250 tonne ‘A’ frame over the stern. Two wide cable drums placed vertically at her stern acted as sheaves to lay flexible and umbilicals in up to two thousand metres of water. She operated from June 2000 on a three year contract to Petrobras of Brazil in the Campos oilfield to the north east of Rio de Janeiro. Acergy Falcon (ex Seaway Falcon) was completed in 1976 by the IHC Gusto yard at Schiedam as the drill ship Petrel and was converted in 1993 into a pipelayer and cablelayer. She retained her central drilling tower and gained a top tension system around which flexible pipelines were led while laying and thus avoided the use of a ‘stinger’ trailing from her stern. Her sister Pelican was converted into the cableship C.S. Nexus for BT Marine Ltd. at Birkenhead.

The Subsea 7 fleet operated worldwide from the North Sea and offshore Norway to the Texan and Gulf of Mexico oilfields including those off Ciudad del Carmen off Mexico, offshore Brazil, Nigeria and West Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the South China Sea. Contracts worth $32 million were won from ConocoPhillips in November 2005 for work associated with the Ekofisk 2/4 platform bypass project in the middle of the North Sea, and from BP in January 2005 for a $12 million contract to supply subsea construction work for the Schiehallion and Foinaven oilfields to the west of the Shetlands. Further BP Exploration contracts worth $100 million followed in 2011 for the Clair Ridge oilfield to the west of the Shetlands.

The Subsea 7 fleet was one of forty vessels in 2011 with twenty five platform and oil rig supply vessels with ‘Seven’ prefixes e.g. Seven Kestrel, Seven Pacific, Seven Pelican, Seven Petrel (survey), Seven Rio, Seven Stingray, Seven Viking and Seven Waves. Chartered vessels include Normand Oceanic, Normand Seven, Normand Subsea, Skandi 7, Skandi Neptune, Skandi Skansen, Simar Esperanca and Havila Subsea. Normand Seven was completed by the Ulstein yard in August 2007 as a standard VS 4220 PSV fitted with a main crane of 250 tonnes capacity and a cargo deck area of 2,500 square metres. She then moved down to the Tyne to undergo a three month conversion to a flexlayer, with her new equipment for working in depths of up to 2,000 metres including a 20.5 metres diameter flexlay carousel, ten storage reels on deck, four modules weighing a total of 800 tonnes, two tensioners each of 160 tonnes capacity, a 110 tonne traction winch, four auxiliary cranes, two Hercules ROVs, and accommodation for her one hundred flexlay and marine crew. She sailed from the Tyne at the end of November 2007 for Vitoria in Brazil to begin a long term charter to Petrobras, which began to search for oil and gas in offshore Brazil in the late 1980s after political problems with piped-in gas from Bolivia.

The Rockwater 1, Rockwater 2 (ex Deepwater 1 and Deepwater2) and Seven Atlantic diving support ships are equipped with moonpools and ROVs as well as cranes of up to 150 tonnes capacity. Seven Atlantic is one of the most advanced saturation dive ships in the world, with single bell saturation diving systems, decompression chambers for up to eighteen divers, and hyberbaric monitoring and control systems (HMCS) for the safety of divers in waters up to 350 metres in depth. Rockwater 1 and Rockwater 2 are similarly equipped with hyperbaric saturation monitoring and control systems.

Pipelaying and flexlay forms a very important part of the Subsea 7 business, with a programme of eight pipelayers and subsea construction vessels ordered for delivery in 2007 onwards at a huge cost of $1B. The big sister pipelayers Seven Oceans and Seven Seas are of 18,367 grt and were completed in 2007/08 by the Merwede yard at Hardinxveld in Holland. Their upper decks are strengthened for loads of ten tonnes per square metre to handle up to 12,400 tonnes of flexible pipeline or heavy pipes, and are lifted from the deck by one crane of 400 tonnes capacity and another two cranes of 160 tonnes capacity. A free running speed of 13 knots is obtained, which is well in excess of the snail’s pace of pipelayers and flexlayers when laying, from six Wartsila diesel electric engines of 27,500 bhp driving three azimuth pods. Seven Antares, Seven Navica, Seven Mar, Seven Polaris, Seven Phoenix, Seven Pacific, and others in the fleet form an important worldwide pipelaying and flexlaying force, and cross the oceans with pipelines to bring crude oil to the shore refineries.

The pipelayer Seven Navica was built as Skandi Navica by the Brattvaag Skibs yard in Norway in 1999, Seven Mar was built as the cablelayer Knight by the Hyundai Mipo Dockyard Co. Ltd. and is a flexlay/construction vessel with a 340 tonne top tension flexible lay system, and has two cranes of 300 tonnes and 60 tonnes capacity together with an ‘A’ frame of 60 tonnes capacity for coiling and uncoiling flexible pipe onto two big below deck powered carousels of 1,600 tonnes capacity. Seven Polaris (ex Acergy Polaris), Seven Phoenix (ex cablelayer Pertinacia) and Seven Pacific from the IHC Krimpen yard in Holland at the end of 2010, are in the range of 13,000 to 16,000 grt, and can also operate as construction crane ships as they are equipped with heavy lift cranes, in the case of Seven Polaris a heavy lift crane of 1,440 tonnes capacity, and with accommodation blocks for up to 260 crew and pipelaying and flexlaying personnel. Seven Phoenix handles heavy pipes on her port side with a vertical tension system to lower the pipe lengths onto the seabed. Seven Antares has a large accommodation block aft for 330 personnel, and is equipped with a 300 tonne main crane to handle heavy pipes of five feet in diameter on a large free deck area of 1,370 square metres.

The jack up accommodation and crane barge Seven Inagha, the crane ship Stanislav Yudin of 24.822 grt completed in August 1985 by the Wartsila yard at Turku, and the pipelayer and heavy construction vessel Oleg Strashnov of 47,426 grt are also operated. The latter vessel was completed in 2011 by the Krimpen Shipyard in Holland with dimensions of length 183 metres and beam of 47 metres, and has since installed heavy subsea structures and foundations, as well as platform topsides, using a fully revolving Gusto MSC crane with a main hook of lifting capacity of five thousand tonnes and an auxiliary hook of 800 tonnes lifting capacity. Seaway Heavy Lifting is a jointly owned Subsea7 venture for heavy lifting construction work, commissioning and decommissioning, and offers fully integrated heavy offshore engineering services to the oil industry.

A large newbuild of 49,735 grt was completed in 2012 as the ultra deep pipelayer and crane barge Seven Borealis of length 182 metres and breadth 46 metres. She has a huge main crane aft of five thousand tonnes capacity and an auxiliary hook of 1,200 tonnes capacity with 2,800 tonnes of onboard pipe storage and two laying systems for pipes up to 24 inch and 46 inch diameter. She has a forward accommodation block for four hundred persons with a large helipad attached to it. She is equipped with two remotely operated vehicles (ROV), and is one of a number of Subsea 7 vessels that can undertake subsea oil construction work worldwide in depths of water up to three thousand metres and are equipped with moonpools and ROVs. Sapura 3000 of length 151 metres and beam of 38 metres is operated jointly with Sapura as a pipelayer and heavy lift subsea construction vessel with a main crane aft of three thousand tonnes capacity and two laying systems for pipes up to 240 and 400 tonnes capacity. She has a forward accommodation block for 330 persons and a deck area of 3,275 square metres and deploys two ROVs.

A new heavy construction and flexlay vessel was completed by the South Korean yard of Hyundai Heavy Industries as Seven Arctic in 2016. She is equipped with a 900 tonne capacity main crane, a 600 tonne capacity top tension system for flexlay, 2,600 square metres of deck space, 7,000 tonnes of underdeck storage space for flexible pipe and umbilicals, and two ROVs. Seven Viking at 11,266 grt, and completed during 2013, is an X-Bow Inspection, Maintenance and Repair (IMR) vessel with a 135 tonne knuckle main crane, ROV operation using moonpools, three thrusters and a state of the art dynamic positioning system, accommodation block for 90 crew, and a free running speed of 17.2 knots.

The U.S. flag vessel Grant Candies of 4,150 grt, owned by Otto Candies LLC of New Orleans, was operating on charter with a black hull on inspection, maintenance, repair, survey and light construction work with a 150 tonne crane, 820 square metres of working deck area and two ROVs working at water depths of up to three thousand metres. She was built by the Dakota Creek Industries yard at Anacortes (Washington) in 2008 and has an accommodation block for 76 persons, and is equipped with a 100 tonne main crane for offshore operations.

Siem Offshore Inc.

Kristian Siem began building up his own wholly owned fleet of offshore support vessels in 2006, with orders for six PSVs of 2,465 grt taken over from Norwegian yards and completed during 2006/07 as Siem Bente, Siem Mollie, Siem Danis, Siem Sasha, Siem Hanne and Siem Louisa. The larger Siem Dorado (later Siem Stork and Siem N-Sea), Siem Marlin and Siem Swordfish of around 5,000 grt on dimensions of length 94 metres, beam of twenty metres, and draft of 7.6 metres were completed during 2007/09. They have service speeds of fourteen knots from twin six cylinder Caterpillar diesels, with more powerful Caterpillar diesels powering the larger Siem Mariner of 6,328 grt. She was renamed as Hugin Explorer in 2008 as a platform supply vessel and construction/ROV vessel. They are equipped with twin thrusters and dynamic positioning systems to maintain position close to platforms and oil rigs. One purchased vessel was Siem Carrier of 3,588 grt. She had been completed in September 1996 by the Ferguson yard at Port Glasgow as Stirling Clyde for a large fleet of offshore vessels owned by Stirling Offshore, and was purchased by Siem Offshore Inc. in 2006 and converted from a platform supply vessel into a cablelayer.

A class of ten larger double hull anchor handling tugs and platform supply vessels (AHTS) of 7,473 grt was completed during 2009/11 as Siem Amethyst, Siem Aquamarine, Siem Diamond, Siem Emerald, Siem Garnet, Siem Opal, Siem Pearl, Siem Ruby, Siem Sapphire, and Siem Topaz. They have a forward bollard pull of 275 metric tonnes, and are powered by four 16-cylinder Caterpillar diesels of 10,340 bhp driving two generators connected to two directional propellers giving a service speed of 13 knots when not towing. The current platform supply vessel fleet also includes Siem Barracuda, Siem Giant, Siem Hanne, Siem Louisa, Siem Sasha, Siem Carrier, Siem Symphony, Siem Pride, Siem Harmony, Siem Melody, Siem Rhapsody, Hugin Explorer, Sophie Siem, Siddis Mariner, Siem Pilot, Siem Sailor, Siem Skipper, and Siem Supplier, the latter vessel being a pipe carrier of 3,200 grt completed in 1999 and purchased in 2007 as Stril Supplier.

The current fleet also includes ten vessels owned by Siem Consub S.A. of Brazil in Siem Atlas, Siem Caetes, Siem Carajas, Siem Maragogi, Siem Marataizes, Siem Marati, Siem Maraba, Siem Paracura, Siem Pendotiba, and Siem Piata for offshore Brazil work. They are used as crew change and platform support vessels, submarine cablelay and repair, and for engineering and oil systems work. Oil survey vessels such as Blue Angel of 3,924 grt and completed in 1999 were managed in 2013 for the large Bourbon fleet of French offshore vessels while working in the offshore Brazilian fields. They were all on charter to Petrobras (Frota Nacional de Petroleiros) of Brazil and flew the Petrobras houseflag of the Brazilian national colours of green, yellow and blue with a green diamond on the yellow part.

This current large owned Siem fleet of 47 offshore vessels with eight under construction at the start of 2016 can tackle almost every kind of offshore work worldwide including pipelaying and cablelaying. There are twenty five platform support vessels (PSV) including those mentioned above, plus six Offshore Subsea Construction and Multipurpose ROV vessels (OSCV and MRSV) in Siem Marlin, Siem Spearfish, Siem Stingray, Siem N-Sea (ex Siem Stork and Siem Dorado), Siem Daya 1 and Siem Daya 2, three oil well intervention vessels in Siem Helix 1, Siem Helix 2 and Big Orange XVIII, one subsea construction vessel in Siem Moxie, and one cablelayer in Siem Aimery. The Siem Offshore Inc. headquarters is at Kristiansand, with branch offices in Brazil at Rio de Janeiro, Macae and Aracaju, Leer (Germany), Groningen (Holland), Gydnia (Poland), Houston (Texas), Accra (Ghana), Mumbai (India) and Perth in Australia. The associated company of Secunda Canada LP operates from offices in Halifax (NS) and St. John’s (NFL).

The company has part owned the scientific drilling vessel, Jodies Resolution, since 2006 via Overseas Drilling Ltd. (ODL) on contract to the Texas A & M Research Foundation for the Joint Oceanographic Institutions Deep Earth Sampling (JOIDES) program on drilling and coring duties in water depths up to seven thousand metres and with boreholes cored to depths of two thousand metres below the sea floor. This long term coring programme has been underway with this vessel since 1985, and her 130 marine crew, drillers, scientists and laboratory technicians are located in the accommodation block forward of the tall drilling tower. She took up these duties in the Autumn of 2008 after a refit.

The X-Bow installation support vessel Siem Moxie works as a team with cablelayer Siem Aimery in wind turbine installation e.g. to install 97 kilometres of subsea power cable connecting 67 offshore wind turbines at the 400 megawatt Veja Mate field in the German sector of the North Sea. The 100 million euro contract also includes the inner array power grid cable, with the work completed during 2016. Siem Offshore has also completed wind turbine installations in the Nordsee One Offshore Wind Farm, the Baltic Two Offshore Wind Farm, and the Bard Offshore Wind Farm 100 kilometres off the island of Borkum in Germany.

Siem Diversification Into Reefers And Car Carriers

Star Reefers A/S was formed in October 2001 from the merger of the British reefer fleet of Blue Star Line and Swan Reefers ASA of Oslo. Kristian Siem became associated with this big reefer fleet during the merger, as he emerged as a ‘white knight’ and majority shareholder for the embattled Swan Reefers ASA. He subsequently turned Star Reefers A/S back into profitability, and took a controlling 73.4% interest in Star Reefers A/S via Siem Capital on the last day of 2002, and later became Chairman of Star Reefers A/S. Karen Siem, wife of the Star Reefers Chairman, launched the first of four new specialised reefers, Star First, on 22nd December 2005 at the Shikoku Dockyard in Japan. A fleet of 42 reefers operated worldwide in 2009 in all of the fruit, fish and perishable food trades. The Siem Group increased the controlling interest in Star Reefers A/S to 81.2% in 2011, and renamed the company as Siem Shipping Inc., with a current fleet in 2016 of 32 reefers of 18.2 million cubic feet capacity.

Siem Industries Inc. took a controlling 88% interest in Siem Thoen Car Carriers (STCC) in August 2002, and acquired three car carriers of 4,300 car capacity in Dresden, Mosel Ace and Verona from a Thyssen Krupp A.G. subsidiary in Lubeck. The trio had been completed by the Uljanik yard in Pula in 2000 with five year charters to Volkswagen Transport Gmbh until the end of 2005, and were managed by Siem Offshore A/S in Norway. Siem Car Carriers A/S was formed in 2008 by former staff managers of United European Car Carriers (UECC) with Kristian Siem as a partner and investor. A year later in June 2009, the Siem Group took on long term charter two car carriers, jointly owned with Partner Shipping of Grimstad, for a new NAPA ro-ro service throughout the Pacific Rim covering Mexico, U.S. West Coast, China, South Korea, Japan and Australia and New Zealand. The remaining 50% share was acquired from Partner Shipping in January 2011.

A fleet of nine car carriers with capacities from 4,300 cars to 6,000 cars was owned at the start of 2016 in Dresden, Viking Bravery, Viking Adventure, Hoegh Bangkok, Hoegh Delhi, Goodwood, Lake Kivu, Rio Grande and Verona, all on long term charter to major car producers including Nissan. Three car carriers of 7,000 car capacity are on order from the Uljanik shipyard in Croatia for delivery in 2017 at a cost of 46 million euros each, and on delivery will be able to carry cars, work vehicles of all types, and oversized wheeled cargo e.g. locomotives and train carriages. The large Siem deep sea and offshore fleet flies a white houseflag with four vertical red crescent shapes placed centrally.

Future Offshore Development

The offshore oilfield support industry has moved into much deeper water during the last two decades, and thus has become much more technologically complex. Kerr-McGee Oil drilled the first productive offshore oil well in 1947 only 10.5 miles off the Louisiana coastline. The complexities of long oil risers and umbilicals are now a far cry from the duties of the first oil rig supply vessel, Ebb Tide, working in 1955 in the Gulf of Mexico and those working a decade later in the North Sea oilfields. In 2016, Subsea 7 S.A. is a giant of the offshore support vessel industry with a large workforce of 14,000 employees working in all of the major offshore oil and gas areas of the world. A big fleet of fifty owned and managed offshore support vessels is operated deploying 175 ROVs for subsea work, and operating from major oil industry fabrication facilities in strategic locations.

Siem Offshore A/S has a similarly sized big fleet of offshore support vessels, with nine vessels working in the Brazilian offshore fields, and six operating in the Canadian offshore fields. Recent additions to this fleet from Norwegian, Brazilian and Polish yards include seven platform supply vessels, two subsea construction vessels, two oil spill recovery vessels, one installation support vessel, and one cablelayer. In addition, the Siem Group have interests in Siem Offshore Contractors (SOC) for submarine cable and umbilical installations and maintenance and wind turbine installations, Siem WIS (Well Intervention Solutions) for pressure drilling and increased oil recovery systems, Wilrig Drilling ASA, Sustainable Power Generation Ltd., as well as the Flensburger Schiffbau Gesellschaft (FSG) shipyard since September 2014, plus interests in the salt and potash industries, and the finance and insurance industries.

Difficult trading conditions with falling vessel utilisation at the start of 2016 were caused by a glut of world crude oil, with the price of a barrel of Brent crude trading for the very low sum of $36 (compared to highs of $150 in good times) and expected to fall even lower. The risks of offshore oil exploration are very high, with many operators in the past having run up huge debts e.g. the semi-submersible Deepwater Horizon rig disaster of 20th April 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico that severely affected the fortunes of BP and its contractors. The rewards are also equally high to those oil companies and their contractors e.g. Siem Offshore and Subsea 7 that strike large, productive offshore oilfields that continue to produce oil for decades.

Several Siem Offshore and Subsea 7 vessels were laid up at the beginning of 2016, but offshore contracts were still being awarded, including a large contract worth around £100 million for the first phase of subsea tie-in work on platforms in the BP Taurus and Libra fields in the West Nile Delta of offshore Egypt. Siem Hanne started a four year charter to Secunda Canada LP, half owned by Siem Offshore, Siem Sasha and Sophie Siem were chartered for 145 days to an oil major, and Siem Amethyst was chartered to Woodside Energy for nine months for operations in the North West Shelf of Australia oilfields. The new PSV, Siem Pride, had been delivered at the end of 2015 by the Remontowa yard in Poland as the first of a class of four dual fuel offshore vessels for a long term charter to Shell in the North Sea. She has a length of 89 metres, beam of 19 metres and can carry 5,500 tonnes of supplies, and is equipped with a heavy lift crane, two ROVs, fire fighting and oil spill recovery, rescue and standby equipment.

Postscript

Kristian Siem has been Chief Executive Officer of Siem Industries Inc. since 1988, and also was Chairman and Managing Director of Norex Industries Inc., Norex PLC, Norex Offshore, Norex Drilling, DSND Offshore, and also for a short time of Kvaerner Shipyards, Norwegian Cruise Line and NCL Holdings. He was also a director of Transocean Drilling Inc. with Norex as the largest shareholder until August 1996, when most of the shares were sold to Sonat of the U.S.A., an oil and gas company founded in 1928. Transocean Drilling is a major player in offshore drilling today with a very large fleet of 62 oil rigs of all types as well as drillships.

Competing drilling companies have included Ensco International, Noble Drilling Corporation, Diamond Offshore of Houston, Rowan Drilling, GlobalSanteFe, and Pride Drilling.

Kristian Siem is also currently a director of all the main subsidiaries outlined in this article, and has been Chairman of Subsea 7 S.A. since January 2011. In the summer of 2011, King Harald V of Norway appointed him to the Knight First Class Order of St. Olav in recognition of his very great efforts in the shipping and other businesses worldwide. He lived in Switzerland for several years, but currently lives in London with his wife Karen and family of three children.