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Press Release

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR 2001 STATION KEEPING SEMINAR

A call for papers is being published for IMCA's 2001 Station Keeping Seminar to be held in Stavanger, Norway 13-14 September 2001.

With its theme Learning from Experiences, the 2001 Seminar will address such issues as operational challenges in a deep water environment; station keeping aspects of decommissioning; combined operations; safety operation mode; challenges such as recovery of and pumping from the Erica and recovery of the Kursk; and diving from FPS. "We are looking for 200 word abstracts on these and other equally topical and relevant issues," explains IMCA's Technical Director, Jane Bugler. Abstracts should be emailed to seminar@imca-int.com; mailed to IMCA at Carlyle House, 235 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 1EJ or faxed to +44 (0) 20 7931 8935. The event will once again have a small exhibition - information on this aspect is also available from IMCA.

The 2001 Station Keeping Seminar is the tenth in the annual series of events established in 1992. Over 200 attended the 2000 Station Keeping Seminar held in Noordwijk aan Zee in The Netherlands in late October. "Once again it provided practitioners with a valuable forum to exchange experience on problems encountered and solutions developed in the cutting edge of deep water operations offshore from Brazil and West Africa," reports Jane Bugler.

"To give delegates an opportunity to hear about other systems they might not be familiar with, the event was run differently from previous ones, using demonstration sessions at the exhibition stands specifically on DP control and acoustic positioning systems," she adds.

The opening session of the 2000 Seminar concentrated on thrusters - covering repair and underwater replacement (Bjorn Utseth of Techno Dive) and thrusters feedback problems and solutions (Klaas Faber of John Crane-Lips). Both presentations proved timely when the IMCA presentation on the 1999 DP incident report showed that thruster failure remains a persistent problem requiring both improved reliability and earlier identification of faults. Discussion at the well-attended afternoon workshop on thrusters was subsequently both lively and wide ranging.

Olivier de Donnafos and Chris van Liefde gave an interesting presentation on Pride International's experience from two new deepwater drill ships working off Angola for the past six months. Pride's past experience of operating dynamically positioned drill ships was used in the development of these new vessels to extend their capability to operations in deep water. This session covered the main features of the new vessel designs with particular reference to station keeping and described some of the difficulties (and their solutions) that had been encountered during construction and start-up.

At one of the afternoon workshops the Statoil idea for an ‘advisory' or ‘white' DP Alert got a thorough airing. Non-drilling representatives voiced their reservations about this notion, but drilling company participants pointed out that a number of DP drilling units working offshore Brazil use an ‘advisory' alert. The workshop concluded that if the drilling industry wants to use an additional alert they should be encouraged to do so, as long as it improves safety and does not delay the sounding of yellow alerts.

The Proceedings of the 2000 Station Keeping Seminar are now available at £30 for members and £100 for non-members from IMCA, Carlyle House, 235 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 1EJ, UK. Tel: +44 (0) 20 7931 8171; Fax: +44 (0) 20 7931 8935; Email: publications@imca-int.com; Website: http://www.imca-int.com

Notes to Editors (common)

• IMCA is an international association with over 450 members in more than 50 countries, representing offshore, marine and underwater engineering companies. IMCA has four technical divisions, covering marine/specialist vessel operations, offshore diving, hydrographic survey and remote systems and ROVs, plus geographic sections for the Americas Deepwater, Asia-Pacific, Europe & Africa and Middle East & India regions, as well as a core focus on safety, the environment, competence and training. IMCA seeks to promote its members' common interests, to resolve industry-wide issues and to provide an authoritative voice for its members.
• IMCA publishes some 200 guidance notes and technical reports. These have been developed over the years and are widely distributed. They are a definition of what IMCA stands for, including widely recognised diving and ROV codes of practice, DP documentation, marine good practice guidance, the Common Marine Inspection Document, safety recommendation, outline training syllabi and the IMCA competence scheme guidance. In addition to the range of printed guidance documents, IMCA also produces safety promotional materials, circulates information notes and safety flashes.
• Judith Patten is here to help you if you want any additional information on IMCA; would like to discuss a feature article; want to organise interviews with key members of the IMCA team, etc.