Work Boat World editorial – May 2008
Just as the offshore service vessel industry arose from the fishing sector, we are now seeing similar kinds of vessels moving on to service offshore fish and wind farms.
There now seems to be no doubt that both offshore mariculture (fish farming) and offshore wind farms are going to develop into sizeable and profitable industries.
In the western, developed world, at least, the fishing – as in catching – industry has been steadily dying for the past 30 years or so. This has been caused by the bad or spineless behaviour of the fishing industry as much as by the energy and determination of the green movement. In most of the OECD countries, fishing fleets have shrunk by about 75 percent over that period.
Far-sighted fishermen and fishing boat builders have, contemporaneously, been focusing their efforts more on the offshore oil and gas industry. Many have got out of the fishing industry altogether.
Over the last decade or so, we have seen the development of offshore fish farms. Until now, these have mostly been located in sheltered coastal waters. For a number of reasons they will start to move further offshore. This will require larger, stronger and more seaworthy cages or pens. It will also necessitate larger and more seaworthy vessels to service the farms.
Even more recently, we have started to see the development of offshore wind (mill) farms. A number of countries are encouraging this development by offering incentives to electricity generating companies to establish floating or fixed offshore wind farms.
We are now even seeing some serious large scale experiments in tidal and wave powered electricity generation.
Each of these activities is going to need large numbers of service vessels. These, almost certainly, will be very similar to the kinds of vessels we now see in the offshore oil and gas industry. Anything from nippy little crew boats to massive construction vessels.
As with the early days of the oil industry, some of those vessels will be converted fishing boats. Others, obviously, are being and will be purpose built. A significant proportion will, I suspect, be converted from surplus offshore service vessels from the oil and gas sector.
Many of those boats will need minimal conversion expenditure. Many are almost ready to switch sectors immediately.
These development should put something of a floor under the current often high prices of modern OSVs. They should certainly soak up a useful proportion of the world's surplus or "trade-in" OSVs.