Oil and gas engineering and construction firm Subsea 7 unveiled another large contract yesterday, worth £63million-plus, and said it meant more jobs in the north and north-east.
The company revealed in the middle of last month that 150 new recruits would join it at Wester, near Wick, after it won deals to design and fabricate pipeline bundles for BP’s Andrew field development and Apache North Sea’s Bacchus development.
A spokesman said yesterday that some recruitment had already taken place but in total more than 200 people would be recruited, principally for the Caithness fabrication yard but also for engineering posts at the firm’s operations headquarters at Westhill, near Aberdeen.
Subsea 7 said the latest contract, for an as yet unnamed client, was for the UK sector of the North Sea.
Subsea 7 will engineer, fabricate, instal and commission a pipeline bundle system, with offshore installation of the bundle scheduled for the first half of 2012, under the deal.
A pipeline bundle integrates the required flowlines, water-injection, gas-lift and control systems necessary for a subsea development and assembles them within a steel carrier pipe. At each end of the pipeline, the structures, manifolds, incorporating equipment and valves, designed specifically to the requirements of the field, are attached.
The fully tested system is then launched and transported to the location. Once installed, no trenching or rock dumping is required.
The BP contract announced earlier is worth £93million and is to connect the oil operator’s Arundel and Kinnoull fields to its Andrew platform.
The Apache contract, also unveiled earlier, is worth £52million and is to connect three additional wells in the company’s Bacchus field to the operator’s Forties Alpha platform.
Subsea 7, which already has a workforce of more than 5,000 people worldwide, has offshore operations in the North Sea, Africa, Asia-Pacific, Brazil and North America.
It has a fleet of dynamically positioned ships capable of reeled and flexible pipelaying, subsea construction and saturation diving and operates pipeline construction yards worldwide.