Market Trends of Offshore Support Vessels Industry
Platform Supply Vessels (PSVs) Expected to Dominate the Market
- Platform supply vessels are offshore ships that bring equipment, other goods, and rig crew to offshore drilling and production platforms.A platform support vessel is a highly required support ship. Also called offshore supply vessels (OSVs), platform supply vessels help to sustain the demands of construction and maintenance projects, too.
- The increase in oil and gas demand at the global level in many countries has prompted the producers to go for more petroleum sources like deepwater oil and gas exploitation. In the United States, the crude oil production from the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) Federal Offshore region reached around 1743 thousand barrels per day in 2022. Such growing trends indicate the demand for offshore petroleum production and related services.
- At the moment, many platform support vessels are needed for the offshore production agreements that were just signed. For example, in March 2022, Havila Shipping, which is based in Norway, was given a contract for the platform supply vessel Havila Heroy.The contract was offered by energy logistics provider Peterson Den Helder for 70 days plus options.
- In October 2022, Equinor awarded six contracts, worth around USD 234 million, to five shipowners for platform supply vessels. Three of the contracts are one-year options, and the other three are three-year option contracts.
- Overall, the demand for platform supply vessels is expected to witness significant growth during the forecast period.
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North America Expected to Dominate the Market
- With the increasing oil prices and drilling costs have gone down, North American offshore oil and gas production has gone up a lot.The high offshore drilling activity, in turn, is expected to be the major driver for the offshore support vessel market in the region.
- The shallow-water drilling activity has been witnessing a decline in the Gulf of Mexico since 2016 due to reduced production rates in the same fields in which the operators are working and the lack of shallow-water discoveries in the recent picture. To maintain offshore production, the exploration and development companies operating in the region are moving toward deepwater plays to respond to the upscaled demand for oil and gas resources, which can drive the offshore vessel market growth significantly.
- Many producers have recently been successful in their offshore exploration attempts. For example, in August 2022, Hess Corporation announced that the company made an oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico in an area that hosts the company's Stampede offshore production platform.
- Further, in January 2023, Talos Energy announced that the company had made two deepwater Gulf of Mexico discoveries, both of which contained oil and natural gas, during drilling operations in late 2022.
- Because of these discoveries, there is likely to be a lot of production in the deep waters of the region in the near future, and offshore vessel providers are likely to get more requests in the near future.
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