Global oilfield service firm Archer said yesterday growing demand for its services meant it needed more than 220 new workers for its North Sea operations.
The expansion comes as work gets under way on new offices at Blackburn, in Aberdeenshire, which will initially house 170-plus Archer employees who are relocating from its sites at Dyce, Aberdeen and Echt, Westhill.
Oslo-listed Archer’s North Sea activities employ hundreds more people offshore, about 530 at the end of last year. A spokeswoman for the company said the new jobs would be onshore and offshore and mostly based at Blackburn, but some of the recruits would work out of Newcastle.
Work on a 70,000 square-foot site in Blackburn Business Park, comprising offices, a workshop and warehouse, started yesterday.
The multimillion-pound investment comes just over two years after Archer was created through the £550million acquisition of Houston-based Allis-Chalmers Energy by Norwegian group Seawell. The enlarged group employs more than 8,300 people in 118 locations globally, including key regional bases in the North Sea, Middle East, Asia and the Americas.
Its main building contractor at Blackburn, Morrison Construction, expects the warehouse and workshop to be up and running in September and the main office building to be ready for occupancy by Christmas.