Reflex Marine recently celebrated its 20th year anniversary and looks back at 20 years of offshore crew transfers and discusses the future challenges.
There are currently over 5000 inhabited installations and 600 mobile drilling rigs in offshore petroleum provinces around the world. These range from the most challenging environments such as the Arctic regions, the North Sea, through to more benign areas such as West Africa and the Gulf of Thailand.
The sizes of crews on production installations vary from single figures up to hundreds, depending on the scale of the operations and the degree of automation in the processes and a typical drilling rig will accommodate up to 100 people. Each operation is supported by vessels and logistics arrangements and the effort to ensure reliable personnel movements on this scale are impressive. Some companies transfer thousands of people every month to and from their installations and ensuring their safe passage is one of the greatest challenges for offshore operators.
Safety is a paramount consideration for the offshore industry and recent years have seen a significant increase in incident monitoring and safety initiatives worldwide from organisations such as the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers, Oil and Gas UK, and Step Change in Safety.
Reflex Marine was set up in 1992 as a direct response to the personal experiences of the co-founders with crane transfers during their time in the field. At the time there were increasing concerns within the industry around transfer operations and the risks involved. The company set itself the ambitious goal of professionalising marine transfer activity across the industry and making it safer.
Over the past two decades we have partnered with asset operators, lifting specialists, and vessel operators around the world in a bid to fulfil our goal. We are particularly proud of the positive impact we have had on safety, and operational capability, especially in harsher environments. Our marine transfer devices, the FROG and the TORO, and the Golden Rules initiative, have all helped to significantly raise the standard for the safe transfer of personnel to and from offshore installations and vessels.
At Reflex Marine, we look forward to continuing our work with organisations in the industry to improve offshore transfer operations on every possible level. We have started by joining an industry initiative to establish a Marine Transfer Forum, to collect annual transfer incident data from major operators, and the results of that will be published in the first annual survey report later in the year.
We see the future challenges for this industry sector to be:
- Building a body of independent and reliable data on transfer activities and incidents (comparable to available aviation data)
- Increasing risks awareness and providing training and support to ensure consistently higher standards
- Continuing to develop equipment and best practices
- Servicing operations in increasingly remote and hostile environments