Monday 25 March 2013

Underwater adventures... Malaysia's Allied Marine & Equipment take a look at sub-sea Myanmar




Underwater Adventures... AME takes a fresh look at sub-sea Myanmar

By Victoria Bruce

From the docks of old London town to the seas off southern Myanmar, Mark Shepherd’s underwater adventures have taken him around the world.
The British-born commercial diver is the managing director of Allied Marine & Equipment (Thailand), a wholly owned company of SapuraKencana Petroleum Berhad and the Thai operating arm of Allied Marine & Equipment Sdn., Bhd., a Malaysian firm specializing in underwater diving surfaces for the oil and gas industry and part of the giant SapuraKencana oilfield services family.
The company is poised to make its first Myanmar play and is eying off the underwater opportunities in the country’s burgeoning petroleum industry, Mr Shepherd told M-ZINE+ Senior Reporter Victoria Bruce.
 “There are rumours of other large multinationals coming into Myanmar soon and it’s no secret that companies here are looking to expand their operations,” he said.
While Myanmar currently offers a fraction of the work AME picks up in Malaysia and elsewhere in the region, Mr Shepherd says that will increase once the country opens up its offshore and deepwater blocks.
Underwater adventures... Photo: AME

“The amount of work available in Myanmar at present is probably about 10 per cent of the work available in Malaysia however it’s obviously not going to remain that way,” he says.
“There’s going to be significant growth in coming years and the people that get in early are likely to do well.”
At this time, AME feels it has some key advantages over its competitors and Mr Shepherd hopes AME will become Myanmar’s service provider of choice in the niche underwater area of inspection, maintenance and repair of offshore structures and pipelines with their teams of divers and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs).
For AME, Myanmar offers another major advantage – its geographical location means that weather offshore is favorable during the lengthy northeast monsoon season between November and March that often makes subsea work difficult or impossible in other areas of the region.
Myanmar is the geographical opposite of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam, where 90 per cent of work is carried out between March and November, when the weather is favourable, Mr Shepherd says.
“For our work we need relatively calm seas and good weather otherwise it’s very dangerous to take people and equipment in and out of the water.”
The diving season here is November through until March so it gives you a chance to increase utilization and assets and maintain at least some work during what is normally a very quiet period for us,” he says.
Calm seas essential for smooth operations... Photo: AME
 So monsoon season in other parts of the region means its perfect time to dive in Myanmar, and for a subsea company like AME this means people and assets that would otherwise be sitting idle are kept in operation.
Mr Shepherd’s underwater career began as a scuba diving hobby at age 18 and has taken him to depth of the North Sea, which he says was “cold and boring” to the pristine waters off Myanmar’s coasts, which he tips to be amongst the clearest in the world.
Starting out his Asian play on a cable ship laying telephone cables around the Gulf of Thailand in 1992, Mr Shepherd later ended up running the operations in a Thai based company as a member of a small management team, turning it into a multimillion dollar public company.
He’s now been with the SapuraKencana Group for two years and heads up AME’s Bangkok base.
While the majority of their subsea contracts are in the Thai and Malaysian market, AME’s Myanmar play follows the flow of international operators with a rising interest in the Southeast Asian nation.
As an assets-based company, reliant on good weather conditions and the number and size of contracts, Mr Shepherd says AME has no plans to set up a permanent base in Myanmar just yet.
 “It’s difficult for a niche business like ours to have a permanent establishment here,” he says. It is more advantageous, at present, to have representative through an agreement.
“The opportunity became apparent when Cranes and Equipment Asia (CEA) decided to open shop here because we had people we knew and trusted on our behalf to be here full time, so we can provide our services without carrying the costs which inevitably would be passed on to the client.”
Like many in the global oil and gas community, he’s also waiting for Myanmar to offer up more offshore and deep water blocks because once operators come in, the demand for subsea services like AME’s will rise.
A whole new world... a diver tends underwater infrastructure. Photo: AME
 “Pretty much everything you do above surface, you have to do underwater at some time or another,” Mr Shepherd says. “Basically there’s an entire infrastructure on the sea bed, often out of the range of divers, that you can’t get down and put a spanner on by hand, so many systems are now being designed for operation by ROV,” he says.
And as operators explore record deep water depth, a new breed of diver has emerged – the electronic highly technical ROVs, some costing in excess of US$6 million and capable of reaching depth of 3 ~ 4,000 metres.
“It’s not economically feasible or pratically possible to carry out man diving operations deeper than around 300 metres,” Mr Shepherd says.
“Once you’ve hit that 300 metre work then everything has to be done by remotely operated vehicles.”
And at the bottom of Myanmar’s deep water basins, a growing complex infrastructure is being built to funnel hydrocarbons from production sites to onshore facilities and beyond, and Mr Shepherd hopes AME’s diving and ROV teams will be down there with it.
ENDS

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