A project aimed at passing on ‘best practice’ skills and knowledge to the next generation of North Sea oil and gas workers has been given a financial boost.
The digital resource is being developed with the International Centre for Oil and the Environment (ICOE) in collaboration with industry, academia and regulators
And the multi-disciplinary project, for today and tomorrow’s industry leaders, has received £50,000 from the Scottish Government.
This supplements the £800,000 received from industry, the universities and other sponsors to enable the research, development and launch of the project.
The platform aims to capture the accumulated knowledge and inter-disciplinary expertise of the last 40 years of offshore operations to transfer it to the next generation.
Entitled Encompassing the Future: Offshore Oil & Gas Operations, Environment Safety and Performance Management, it pulls together authoritative and researched material on the successful development of the North Sea offshore.
It will allow users to meet the challenges of producing and operating safely and without harm to the environment in a cost effective manner.
Paul Warwick, chairman of ICOE’s advisory council, said: “Against a backdrop of oil price volatility, a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources and the gradual loss of experience in maturing and increasingly-challenging provinces, the global oil and gas industry is entering one of its most defining periods.
“The loss of personnel through today’s and previous downturns has created a gap in knowledge and experience. Our survivability and sustainability depend upon filling this vacuum.
“ICOE’s resource will help close the knowledge and experience gap by providing expert guidance on the best solutions to the challenges of low morale, knowledge loss, ageing infrastructure and declining investor confidence as a result of the urgent need to bring costs to more realistic and sustainable levels in a lower for longer oil price environment.”
Paul Wheelhouse, Scottish Government Minister for Business, Innovation and Energy added: “I am pleased to have the opportunity of supporting this ambitious project which seeks to harness the knowledge and expertise built up by the North Sea industry.
“This is a resource that is being created by industry, for industry. It will provide a comprehensive evidence base to ensure that efforts to tackle inefficiencies and change behaviours all draw on best practice experience for environmental and safety performance.
“This project has the opportunity to capture a wealth of knowledge, which will be of significant value to the industry going forward.”
The resource will be launched on August 3 at Kings College, University of Aberdeen.
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