Oil Companies Want Deepwater SAR Support

One result of the ongoing drive to push further offshore to explore for and exploit oil and gas fields? A developing demand for search and rescue support of those operations. International oil and gas companies collectively have been pursuing greater overall safety for their workers in recent years. That has led to rising demand for newer technology helicopters with state-of-the-art equipment to transport crews to offshore platforms. At the same time, those companies have been pushing into fields 200 nm or more off shore in search of new oil and gas reserves. Some of those operations are at or beyond the limit of land-based SAR support. So manufacturers expect oil and gas companies to contract in the future for SAR helicopters to be staged on intermediate rigs. Norway's Statoil already has done so. In mid-2007, it awarded CHC Helicopter a contract to provide two all-weather SAR EC225s, to be deployed in part at Statoil's Statfjord field in the North Sea. For related news