MOL Breaks in to Offshore Support

Mitsui O.S.K. Lines (MOL) has teamed up with Mitsui & Co. and AKOFS Offshore to enter the offshore support vessel market.

The company has agreed to purchase the subsea support vessel Skandi Santos from the current shipowner through a three-way joint venture company called Avium Subsea which started business effective from November 23.

Avium Subsea will be headquartered in Norway with MOL taking a 25 percent share, Mitsui & Co. taking 25 percent and AKOFS Offshore taking 50 percent.

Brazil's national oil company, Petrobras, has chartered the Skandi Santos from AKOFS since 2010, using it to install subsea facilities in deep-sea oil and gas fields off Brazil. The Skandi Santos is designed to install and retrieve subsea trees and modules, including subsea structures and manifolds at water depths of up to 2,300 meters.

The project is MOL's first step into the subsea business, where the company expects stable demand and steady earnings through the overall lifecycle of oil and gas projects - from survey of subsea oil and gas fields, to installation, inspection, maintenance, repair, and decommissioning of subsea facilities. MOL has also agreed to examine opportunities to expand cooperative ties, based on a long-term perspective, with Mitsui & Co., AKOFS, and its parent company Akastor.

The subsea support vessel business is a field in which MOL can make use of extensive experience gained over two decades of managing cable-laying vessels and represents a new offshore business following its FPSO, FSRU and shuttle tanker operations.