A HULKING brute of a barge, the
Acergy Piper squats in the North Sea like a giant beetle, an hour’s helicopter ride from the Norwegian oil and shipping town of Bergen.
The barge is a floating factory that lays pipe and it is stitching together Langeled, the world’s longest sub-sea pipeline, a tube that will feed Norwegian gas to Britain. The pipe will be fed by Ormen Lange, a giant gasfield named after a Viking longboat, and the project, operated by Norsk Hydro, is being monitored closely in the UK. Britain is short of gas and Ormen Lange’s output will meet about a fifth of UK gas demand.
Within the bowels of the barge, hundreds of men work frantically round the clock in 12-hour shifts, welding together great lengths of tubular steel. From the rear, a long ramp — the “stinger” — disgorges pipe into the sea. A dozen anchor chains radiate from the piper like insect legs, and the vessel advances across the North Sea, hauling in chain at the bow and releasing it at the stern.
It seems a primitive, almost medieval, method of propulsion, but this is no fiendish Viking craft filled to the brim with blonde warriors, heading for the English coast. These “Vikings” are not Norwegian, they are Pakistani, Filipino, Malaysian and Thai. Acergy Piper is a polyglot, multinational, offshore and outsourced industrial machine. The welders hail from every corner of the planet where there is skilled labour to be found at competitive rates.
Visitors to the Acergy Piper are greeted by two Americans — Raymond Caldwell, the boss of the ship, and Fredy Laurente, the wise-cracking Texan chief safety officer. Mr Caldwell is a bit grumpy. The barge is inching along at a fraction of its normal speed. On a usual day its four cranes, each weighing 160 tonnes, would be thundering up and down tracks on either side of the barge, unloading lengths of pipe, 42in (1m) in diameter and each weighing 19 tonnes. But the cranes are idle and pipe-loading from supply ships has been suspended.
A hurricane off the Irish coast has churned up the sea and it is causing problems. It looks a moderate swell from the top deck of the barge, but the wave height — more than five metres — is too much for the tugboats to move the barge anchors safely and the beetle’s scuttle has slowed to a creep.
“It’s their decision,” Mr Caldwell says, shrugging at the distant tugs. He is anxious to get going. As Acergy Piper creeps south, another pipe-laying ship, Solitaire, is moving north to a target meeting point north of Sleipner, a production platform and hub for Norwegian gas.
At Sleipner gas is gathered from myriad fields and then blasted down export pipelines to Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. The southern section of Langeled, linking Sleipner to Easington on the Yorkshire coast, is complete and the two ships are close to connecting the northern leg, linking Sleipner to the Ormen Lange gasfield.
Acergy Piper has laid 465km (290 miles) of pipe and only 27km remain. She is ahead of Solitaire and the boss would like to keep it that way — as do the members of the crew, who stand to gain if they arrive ahead of schedule.
“They are a bit angry at Him up there because of the weather,” Mr Caldwell says. “There’s a good bonus system for everyone, from cleaners to welders, and they have reaped the rewards.”
The near-completion of the operation without a significant hitch is arousing curiosity, and the barge has had Russian visitors. Norsk Hydro is desperately keen to help Gazprom to develop Shtokman, a giant gasfield in the Barents Sea. There will be a sub-sea pipeline stretching 600km through the Arctic Circle — perhaps a job for Acergy Piper.
Good welding is critical, and that is down to the men below deck, working at arc-welding stations running the length of the ship. Ultrasonic scanners examine each weld for flaws before the joint is wrapped and coated in concrete. Then the pipe is expelled from the ship.
The failure rate is running at a pleasing 0.4 per cent and, on a fine day, Acergy Piper can lay five kilometres, moving lengths of pipe every six minutes; but the men are in go-slow mode.
Thirty nationalities are on board, and the welders, all male, work in national teams for easy communication. They work 12 weeks and get four weeks off, bunking four to a room. The shifts ensure some privacy.
The only female members of the crew are two dozen Romanians. They all work in the kitchens, serving up an Asian- Mediterranean-American fusion cuisine. The different nationalities rub along together fine, Mr Laurente says. There is a gym and a “big-ass plasma screen”. An Indian welder has been working on the ship for 15 years, almost the entire life of the vessel. Could he not get welding work at home? “Not for this money,” he says, but won’t divulge what he earns. Skilled welders have become gold dust in a market made frantic by oil development. A tight-lipped head of human resources at Acergy will not reveal terms and conditions. “You say you’re a journalist. You could be a competitor,” she says.
Robert Duffin, Acergy’s group business development director, says: “It’s always a challenge to find the right men, but the industry is very busy at the moment, and there is a general shortage.”
In the United States the shortage has driven wages to extraordinary levels, with reports of skilled journeymen earning salaries of $100,000 (£54,000) for offshore work. That inflation is wrecking project budgets and encouraging companies to scour the developing world for labour.
Heavily unionised, the Norwegian oil industry pays its local staff well: offshore cleaners can earn 500,000 kroner (£41,000) a year. Geir Lindholt, vice-president of gas infrastructure at Norsk Hydro, reckons that it would be impossible to staff such an operation with Norwegians, even if pay were not an issue. “You would not find the people,” he said.
Blue-collar skills have moved south and east. “This was work done by Europeans and Americans until five or ten years ago, and it is being taken over by the Third World,” David Roberts, of MPS, an Aberdeen engineering recruitment firm, said. “The reason why is because they are cheaper. They are qualified to American standards but they earn less and the work rotation is longer than for Europeans.”
It’s the wages of energy. To lay the million tonnes of pipe that will send billions of cubic metres of gas flowing to Britain, we must burn thousands of gallons of jet kerosene to fly men from Manila, Bombay and Bangkok to a barge in the middle of the North Sea.
