eSea EM AGA ZINE FROM M A ERSK TR A INING
M A R I T I M E /O I L & G A S/ W I N D/C R A N E · N O.33/2019
This Birthday’s A Gas As Free As the Wind Enter, A Center Without A Sea From 21 metres to 12 kilometres, in 200 years Dynamically Tailor-made Super Sonnich Beautiful Island – Wonderful People Best/Worst Wedding Gift Ever A trio of accessible security courses Rig Gigs
When TEU means Transportable Educational Utility
33
content 4
14
8
This Birthday’s A Gas
As Free As the Wind
The Zohr natural gas field, 200 kms north of Port Said, is the biggest in the Mediterranean. For the Maersk H2S Safety Services team it has grown seven fold in just one year. >
Onsite training has many benefits over more con ventional venues. It’s about location. You can introduce a higher percentage of the workforce to training, there by cutting travel costs. >
4
Enter, A Center Without A Sea
4
The Kongsberg maritime simulators are the first of their kind to be installed in Cairo. They are managed by Maersk Training and mark a broadening of the courses on offer at the Cairo campus. >
16
18
From 21 metres to 12 kilometres, in 200 years
4
For two centuries drilling for oil and gas has been a hazardous occupation. This is the story about Well Control. >
Dynamically Tailor-made
4
Having a rig crew on a normal maritime dynamic positioning course is like a one-legged man buying a pair of shoes – there is a fair degree of inbuilt redundancy. >
32 22 Super Sonnich As we turn to spring and longer days, for some the most physical thing on the horizon is the pull rope to kick start the lawnmower back into life. For others it is a question of sport or a challenge, or both. >
26
34
30
Beautiful Island – Wonderful People
Best/Worst Wedding Gift Ever
A trio of accessible security courses
Maersk Training has been chosen to be ‘the midwife’ to a huge educational complex in Taiwan. >
The Brexit settlement pales into insignificance when you look a deal struck between the kingdoms of Denmark and Scotland a while back. A long while back. >
It’s online learning that enables your career to develop without you having to dramatically break away from your routine. You can take the course virtually anywhere, anytime. >
4
Rig Gigs Chris Jacques regularly gets pay cheques from two very different sources, for two very different lines of work, one totally embracing safety and one with a reputation of madness. >
4
Blades, Boxes & Bikes W
ind, water, poisonous gas, a dash of H2S – a heady cocktail for this eSea, and it any of these elements is demanding front stage it is probably wind. It is quite amazing how this sector, that barely got a mention in the first ten eSeas, has developed in time it has taken to write all 33. In 2011 the average large offshore turbine was 3MW, today they are kissing 9.5. There were 1,132 offshore turbines in Europe, today there are over 4,000 and eight years ago only two of the top 21 wind farms had been established. All this in the time most of us hold on to our cars for.
2011 saw the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan and a global re-think in the cost and consequences of the power behind the socket. Up to this point, Taiwan, so often a leader in electronic innovation, had been slow to pick up on wind power – today it is seen as the next major area of growth. Coming into the game late they have the advantage of learning from others and they recognize that to build is one thing but to sustain another. They are establishing a huge training college for the industry and have enlisted help in order to do so. Here through the eyes of the scheme’s project manager we see the challenge that is in front of them.
Then there is the story of man who trains to expel energy. Sonnich Nielsen is one of those people who define ordinary people by being extra-ordinary. This summer he makes his four attempt to win one of the world’s most arduous bike challenges, a mere 700 kms across the Artic in 84 hours. Where he is going there are no paths, no road signs and no darkness and for company a fair percentage of the world mosquito population. We wish him a super holiday. Oh and the poisonous gas, we talk to one of the people responsible for ensuring that the biggest gas field in the Mediterranean isn’t an ill wind.
Richard Lightbody rli039@maersktraining.com
Hamburgefintsiv
This Birthday’s A Gas Maersk’s H2S team police and protect Egypt’s most important natural resource
T
The Zohr natural gas field, 200 kms north of Port Said, is the biggest in the Mediterranean. It dwarfs the second, third and fourth largest fields. In fact, combined they don’t reach the 30 trillion cubic feet of gas Zohr contains. From the day it was discovered in 2015, it was always going to be big, but for the Maersk H2S Safety Services team it has grown seven fold in just one year.
he Maersk team, together with its agent in Egypt ECGS and SMA Offshore, has been on site since November 2017 and in the first year trained over 10,000 people. This is largely because the plant is a SIMOPS, meaning that it is simultaneously in operation whilst it is still being built. It is huge, 3.5 kilometres from end to end and growing all the time, just like the Maersk team.
4
They started out as five and now with more than 30, they look back on a first year where the records have just tumbled around them. The plant holds the record for start-up time, from the moment of discovery to production. Normally production from a new field is expected to start in five to ten years, here it was two. A twohour drive from Cairo at Port Said, the Zohr plan is a game changer
Hamburgefintsiv
for Egypt. From being a country reliant on imported gas, it now an export according to the country’s petroleum minister. A gas plant runs on very strict safety criteria – those responsible for ensuring the gas safety measures and standards are met are the H2S crew that works round the clock, ten on the day shift, six at night. There is no
admission to the site without prior training by the team, from the Chief Executive to the window cleaner, everyone is trained. The site is split into three groups. Yellow is for administration and office, green is for construction and red is production. Each of these areas requires a different level of training and accreditation. Allied to that the system needs to be managed on site.
In a single year Maersk H2S provided 16,000 filter masks and 10,000 gas detectors. 5
Training is only a part of the H2S job at the Zohr plant. Safety criteria dictate that no manual operation involving gas on the site is conducted without a check carried out by the Maersk crew. H2S the gas is an unforgiving poison, anything above 500 ppm will almost certainly lead to death within hours, and in extreme cases, death is instantaneous. However the
Hamburgefintsiv
Clockwise, All kitted up in the heart of the plant. Gheorghe in the Esbjerg store. Even the most industrial scenes assume beauty at dusk. Gheorghe passing the message on. 6
presence of hydrogen sulphide, is not all bad news. Apart from the bi-product of sulphur it is usually an indication of the high quality of the oil or gas it is mixed with. CONSTANT CARE – CONSTANTLY AWARE ‘The project being SIMOPS creates a very big challenge from a safety point of view,’ says Gheorghe Tudorache , one of two team
leaders. ‘To give you an example, if people have to go into an area to work we go first and check that it is safe. If they want to weld or grind, we check the area and sign the permit, we have hundreds of permits daily.’
a nurse and has worked as a rig medic and safety officer. Now as a H2S supervisor he’s happiest, ‘here you build things, you see what you have done with your own eyes. You take something that is a hazards and you build something to use it with.’
Gheorghe, a Romanian living in Denmark and working in Egypt, has been with the project from the earliest of days. He trained as
Apart from gas safety, security, training and site control, Maersk H2S also is responsible for 7
equipping everyone who enters the plant. So far they have provided 16,000 filter masks and 10,000 gas detectors. H2S gas is normally burnt off during production. The expected lifetime of the plant is 25 years. On your first anniversary, it is the one flame you don’t want to blow out. ■
As Free As the Wind
Hamburgefintsiv
Largest Wind Farm Gets Almost On-site Training
M
aersk Training has centres in Chennai, Rio de Janeiro, Dubai and Houston – with populations of 9.8, 7.4, 3.1 and 2.3 million respectively. there
is plenty of scope for providing training. Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, England, with a population of 57,000, is the latest location to feature on the
Maersk Training map, albeit it a temporary visit. Barrow is small, but in industrial terms it is well-used to the terms ‘biggest and first’. It once had the 8
world’s biggest steel works and submarine building docks. Today, because it has plenty of scope, it is the first home to a new mobile wind training unit.
Hamburgefintsiv
This is because nineteen kilometers west of Barrow lies the world’s largest offshore wind farm, fittingly, as with Maersk, it has a strong Danish connection.
It is operated by Ørsted, formerly Dong Energy, in conjunction with Scottish and Southern Power, with substantial backing coming from two Danish pension funds,
PKA and PFA. With capacity to power 600,000 homes it replaces the London Array as the world’s single biggest producer. It is also the first windfarm to use two 9
different suppliers of generators on the same field, a factor that adds additional significance to the training process.
Hamburgefintsiv
10
The offshore site was originally established in 2004 with the award of a 50 year lease, but the Walney Extension which came online last year with 47 Siemens Gamesa and 40 MHI Vestas turbines, adds a further 659MW to the total capacity. It is carried along 200 kms of cable to the national grid. The mobile unit, currently stationed on Walney Island, is not the first time that Maersk Training has employed the technique of purpose-building a mobile unit. Two CraneSims to train quayside crews were introduced in 2007. Together they have subsequently visited twelve ports in ten countries. Onsite training has many benefits over more conventional venues. It’s about location. Onsite you can introduce a higher percentage of the workforce to training, thereby cutting travel costs. The staff are also acclimatized and
GWO training in the Mobile Wind Solution
around them the equipment and challenges they have in their daily working lives. With no need to jet off to an unfamiliar location those on the course are already in a company frame of mind.
GWO Working at Height: GWO approved working at height ladders are fitted and deployed during the course to run all practical exercises. GWO Fire Awareness: The centre is positioned in a way to allow for a fire ground. GWO First Aid / Enhanced First Aid: Should a classroom not be available, a mobile classroom will be set up using the mobile centre. GWO Manual Handling: The centre is positioned in a way to allow for ample practical training space. GWO Sea Survival: The centre is located near quayside to allow for the transition piece to be deployed. The mobile solution includes the Maersk boat and samples of sea water are taken to ensure it meets GWO standards. GWO BTT: A Maersk GWO BTT training room is installed in the solution which includes all BTT workstations. GWO Advanced Rescue: The mobile solution also allows for the soon to be GWO approved advanced hub rescue. A retractable hub unit is fitted as well as the design for challenging confined space courses (awareness, entry and rescue). Advanced hub rescue and advanced wind turbine rescue are ready made courses and can be delivered immediately. Confined Space: One container internals are designed for confined space training, and gives a realistic and challenging environment for the course.
The Walney Island units are also based on 42-foot containers, but in this case, unlike the stand-alone crane versions, they come, like Lego-like blocks, to be assembled on site. This cleverly enables the employment of the exteriors of the containers for height courses. Literally thinking outside the box. Placement on location also offers more flexibility, as with being on a quayside giving access to water situational training like sea survival. The other containers enable practice in escaping from confined space, as well as having a classroom. There is also storage. Currently used exclusively by Ă˜rsted the courses running today are GWO Advance Rescue and
11
the dual rescue enhanced first aid course. With the need to be constantly up-to-date it is likely that refresher courses will be introduced in coming months. The Walney Extension is just the latest field to come online in the area. Ørsted already generates 367MW from the original Walney and the adjacent West of Duddon Sands farm which contributes a further 389MW. MEANWHILE IN INDIA Across the world in Chennai, a second mobile wind training option has also been commissioned. The Indian version is a different way of tackling the need for on-site training. Instead of using three containers to create a mini complex they’ve managed to get as much as possible into one. The Chennai version is slightly more limited in course options but it does have transportation and logistics pluses because of its size.
12
Manufactured at the request of Siemens Gamesa (SG) India it is approved by Det Norske Veritas. It is the first unit of its kind to bring basic safety training to India. For Barrow the installation means an additional 250 operational and maintenance jobs through Ørsted alone – much needed in an area that has seen its traditional resources diminish. Barrow once had the world’s largest steelworks, built around the huge deposits of hematite, the mineral form of iron. That lead to shipbuilding being established and later specialized with Barrow becoming the renowned centre for submarines. Barrows fortunes have risen and fallen over the years but with the arrival of the wind industry there is finally the prospect of long-term stability in one industry at least. ■
Hamburgefintsiv
India’s compact solution in a single box
13
A
Enter, A Center Without A Sea Cairo central to a region’s maritime aspirations.
s Egyptian cities go, Alexandria is near the sea. You can’t get much closer, through history it has been a great port, but the capital, Cairo, more famed for camels than container vessels, is the new center for maritime training, not just in Egypt, but for potentially the entire Middle East. With support and in conjunction with Maersk Training, the Arabic Academy for Science and Technology & Maritime Transport Integrated Simulators Complex (AAST) has had a ‘soft opening’ in the capital. It was, according to Captain Ahmed Abdel Maksoud, the most natural of moves.
obvious decision to establish a simulator-based training centre in Cairo despite it being 120 kms from salt water. The Kongsberg simulators are the first of their kind to be installed in Cairo. They are managed by Maersk Training and mark a broadening of the courses on offer at the Cairo campus. Up until now the courses have been about transport, logistics and language. The Academy recently received Nautical Institute Accreditation to conduct Dynamic Positioning courses and it is generally held throughout the region that a certificate from the Academy carries university status.
‘Egypt is huge and Cairo, although not a port itself, just happens to be a the hub for so many important ports in the region,’ he explains. As its name suggest The Academy is not just an Egyptian body, it is owned by the Arab League, representing all of the 22 Arab states. With significantly better international links, it was an
Currently there are four or five courses a month with a local staff of four and since they are working to a curriculum established by the Nautical Institute; they will be supported by Maersk Training instructors as and when needed. ■
14
Map data ©2018 Google
Hamburgefintsiv
15
Giza pyramids on the outskirts of Cairo. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Hamburgefintsiv
From 21 metres to 12 kilometres, in 200 years A short history of well control
For two centuries drilling for oil and gas has been a hazardous occupation. In the early days it was more from good fortune than good practice that a well would deliver its contents without an incident. As the demands and rewards increased, so did the dangers and, thankfully, a professional understanding of those
risks. There entered a new discipline into the drilling process, Well Control.
The history of Well Control training goes back nearly half a century and is best told in four distinct eras. Today we are entering a fifth era, and in the continually upward curve that is improving safety and knowledge, it promises to be the most complete. The aim is an era free from the blowouts and accidents that provoked much of the evolution of the process of simply
I
n simple terms Well Control is a combination of predicting, knowing and assessing the natural pressures on the wellbore and taking action to compensate, so that pressure is controlled and the danger of a blowout averted.
16
drilling a hole in the ground into a controlled science. Twenty-twenty-one* is the two hundredth anniversary of Willian Hart digging an eight meter well and then drilling a further thirteen meters into the earth of New York State to strike gas; gas that lit a local inn and then the streets of Fredonia and drew sightseers from all over the
s
eastern coast. Today the world’s deepest oil well is a little over twelve kilometers and offshore rigs regularly drill at three kilometers. The depths, the strata and the geological minefields have put a new strains on technology and those operating it. The switch had to be made from operating to controlling and in 1940 the International Association of Drilling Contractors was formed, but it would be thirty years before the first significant era, the sole watchdog. FROM SOLE WATCHDOG TO GLOBAL In the Seventies IADC certified training centres, including the newly established Maersk Drilling Training Centre in Svendborg, Denmark. The challenge was that globally there was a huge expansion in training centres and IADC hadn’t the manpower and systems to control quality levels. The training industry was getting dangerously out of hand. IADC had to throw in theirs and across the world revoked their
licenses. With one letter sent to every centre they turned their recognized certification system off.
body. It was introduced in 1992. Within two years their structure had gone global and the name was changed in 1995 to the present day International Well Control Forum and we had entered era IV.
Era II had already begun. In an effort to establish a guideline, the European Union had set up a committee tasked with organizing a standard training syllabus and certification programme for drilling personnel. What subsequently happened tended to leave out the word standard; the result, pure chaos. Dozens of different certificates emerged and by 1989 the industry was without focus and less clearly driven than ever.
The IADC came back into the frame with its own certification. From the mid-Nineties they offered certification based on a strict curriculum followed by a test.
a senior consultant at Maersk Training, who is currently on the board and a driving force behind taking the five-tier course up to a sixth and heralding a new era of Well Control training and implementation. ■ *2021 is often quoted as the bicentennial, but there is one school of thought, and a monument, that says it was in 1825 that William Hart drilled and struck gas. He was someone acquainted with danger,
IWCF now has a five-level structure built around the different competencies demanded by stepping up from one level to another.
being a gunsmith. It was a relative of Hart, Preston Barmore, who used both of Hart’s specialist traits. Barmore introduced an unnatural element to increase the gas flow. He exploded 3.6kgs of gunpower at a depth of 37
Seven European countries formed a working party based on the EU project. Denmark, Norway, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom took a new stance and called for, and devised, an assessment programme for skills and knowledge. This was the third era and European Well Control Forum was the first really focused
Maersk Drilling Training Centre was recognized by IADC in the 1970’s and under its shorter title, Maersk Training, it has been part of the story since the establishment of European Well Control Forum, with at least one person on the board and driving the changes towards the fifth era, the future. That is an ongoing process, says Lynge Nielsen, 17
metres to greatly improve the output of a well. It was 1857 and fracking had arrived.
Hamburgefintsiv
Rig men get 100% focus
Dynamically Tailor-made 18
Having a rig crew on a normal maritime dynamic positioning course is like a one-legged man buying a pair of shoes – there is a fair degree of inbuilt redundancy.
T
he crossflow of information is one of the evolutionary facets of creating new programmes at Maersk Training. Courses like Performance Enhancement have given every section of a rig, from marine to crane to drill floor, the opportunity of seeing life from another professional point of view. But it is not just the participants who have had their eyes opened, the instructors too have been given the chance to revaluate what they can contribute. It was a natural process for the instructors to question putting rig crews on an established Nautical Institute certified dynamic positioning courses. The DP Drilling Refresher Course came out of a request from SeaDrill who used to have it within their
It is an advantage that Maersk Training has housed maritime and drilling under one roof with a shared aim own training matrix. In reinventing the wheel, the non-rig references and maritime generic sections were stripped away. The end result is not for specific rigs or wells or companies, but it created a platform that embraces all likely, and many hopefully unlikely, scenarios. ‘DP is the same thing on board an offshore support vessel needs to have a different focus than 19
Hamburgefintsiv
Maersk Venturer holds the record for drilling a well in the deepest water. The Raya-1 prospect was drilled at a water depth of 3,400 meters (11,156 feet) in the South Atlantic off Uruguay in 2016. The Venturer crew were earlier brought together on a New Build course at Maersk Training.
20
the DOP on a drillship of semisubmersible,’ says maritime instructor Klaus Hovesen. It gives them situations that are relevant to what they do, not specific jobs, but using well specific guidelines (WSGs) it places them in the right environment. A WSG defines what exactly can and cannot go on. ‘I’ve been here five years and what we have learnt in the ultra-close cooperation with the drillers is not to be ignored,’ says Klaus. AN OPEN PLUS It is an advantage that Maersk Training has in that maritime and drilling is housed under one roof with a shared aim. Industries with different purposes, but ones that need to rely on each other at crucial points in an operation and therefore need to find a
common language. The maritime instructors are, industry-wise, bilingual and an essential part of the crossflow of information. The new DP refresher course was piloted in Houston and is ready to roll out in Svendborg and Rio de Janeiro. It is not company specific because, as Klaus explains, the very openness of the course, with participants from different companies and rigs, brings alternative viewpoints and triggers constructive thinking. The course remains at four-days, allowing for expansion into areas that otherwise might have received scant attention such as drill head scenarios, monitoring the riser and the one critical piece of equipment that is unique to the semi-subs and drill ships, the disconnect button. ■
The major difference between maritime and O&G DP, with a rig there’s a disconnect button on the bridge.
21
Hamburgefintsiv
Super Sonnich From training with fire and danger to living with cold and pain, Esbjerg’s 200% man
A ‘highway’ somewhere in the Artic
22
As we turn to spring and longer days, for some the most physical thing on the horizon is the pull rope to kick start the lawnmower back into life. For others it is a question of sport or a challenge, or both.
catnap and bike maintenance. It demands months of preparation, there is no back up team, and most of those who start will not see the finish line.
t is difficult to imagine a more physical way of spending your leisure time than an annual event that takes place within the Arctic Circle. Whilst we head to the summer houses and the beach, Sonnich Bjerg Nielsen heads north to compete in one of the world’s most grueling mountain bike events. Cycling three days and nights across tundra, through rivers and lakes for 700 kilometers, is how Sonnich gets away from the grind of the office at Maersk Training in Esbjerg where he, fittingly, leads the survival team.
There are no roads in the figure of eight loop around northern Norway. Following a GPS path on small screen, the riders use deer tracks and the occasional ATV path to complete the journey. There are three different distances, 150, 300 and 700kms. Sonnich has entered the 700 three times. For family reasons he had to stop his first attempt after one day and the next time his teammate, (teams are of two or three) broke his foot and couldn’t continue. Sonnich switched to another two-man team, but they were too slow and were disqualified because it was calculated that they wouldn’t finish within the time limit.
The Offroad Finnmark race is seen as one of the world’s toughest MTB events. It’s 84 hours with very limited stops for food, a
Third time lucky, despite the fact that the teammate who broke his foot on the previous attempt was physically exhausted and
I
out of the race. Sonnich and his remaining colleague were third to cross the line. Only five of the 18 teams made it. In truth Sonnich shouldn’t have made it to the start line. ‘I broke my shoulder in a crash in a “short” 12 hour race the previous week, but I couldn’t let the others down,’ says Sonnich who, strapped up and with pain killers, started the race along with fifty others. ‘This race gets to you. It is now in my blood,’ says Sonnich looking to the future which is just around the corner at the end of July. He knows what lies ahead. During the 84 hours he will ascend and descend about 10,000 meters, cross between 120 and 150 lakes swollen by a wet summer and for 90% of the journey wear a mosquito hat on to protect his face. His legs will have no such pampering. At the end of the last race Sonnich couldn’t see a part of his legs that hadn’t been bitten and blistered.
23
”I broke my shoulder in a crash in a ’short’ 12 hour race the previous week, but I couldn’t let the others down.” Looking back he recalled, ‘We got wet after about ten minutes and that is the way we stayed until the end of the race. There were two obligatory stops of four and a half hours, during which you had to repair your bike, eat and sleep.
”Either to participate in a race across the Pyrenees or to climb the Matterhorn.” Sonnich’s dilemma
Amazingly we, the three of us, only had two punctures between us.’ Sonnich’s other passion is mountain climbing and normally he alternates between mountain biking and mountain climbing, but the latter has taken a bit of a back seat recently. He spent last summer’s ‘vacation’ crossing the Pyrenees, a seven-day race consisting of linking sections and time trials, a bit like the Tour de France. Sonnich, backed by his family in a camper wagon, won three of the sections. It was
totally different challenge to the Finnmark. With back up, proper sleep and food, it is an experience to take in the views. National Geographic nominated it amongst their ten best MTB races. Slightly longer at 800kms, the elevation is twice as high, a total of 20,000 meters – that’s more than twice the height of Everest. Classic images of the Finnmark show endless tundra but there is a lot of climbing – it is the equivalent of cycling up Everest in four days with only five hours sleep!
It was as if it wasn’t difficult enough to start with, but Sonnich Nielsen wasn’t going to pull out of one of the world’s most demanding mountain bike races because of something trivial, like a broken shoulder. Eleven months of training and a commitment to his three-man team were more important to 47 year-old Sonnich than a ‘trivial’ cracked bone. For the third time he’d take part in Offroad Finnmark, a bike race in the Artic like no other. It is the only race in the world over several days where there is no darkness, no excuse to stop. Finnmark is the northern part of Norway, not to be confused with Finland.
This year’s race happens from July 27 to August 3, but we will keep you posted – Sonnich is in the mens elite OF700 with teammate Allen Laumand Nielsen. You can keep an eye on their progress because GPS is vital, its how the competitors know where to go in an environment of rolling tundra and lakes. The same GPS will let you track Allen and Sonnich. Their wives are up to support with a FaceBook feed which last time had 5000 hits.
For 84 hours they would cycle day and night (except that there isn’t any), checking in at twelve food stops and get five hours sleep. Only ten people would finish, amongst them Sonnich and one of his teammates.
24
His other passion is mountain climbing. Fitting for someone whose second name is Bjerg, Danish for mountain. Mountain climbing isn’t a big home-based sport, the tallest part of the land being a dizzy 171 meters above water. Last year the target was to conquer Mount Elbrus, Russia’s highest peak at 5,642 meters. ‘I tend to alternate between climbing and cycling but next year I have a big decision. I’m quite confused, either participate to in a race across the Pyrenees or climb the Matterhorn.’ At the moment the Trans Pyr, eight days heading west along the Pyrenees is favourite because it can be combined with a family holiday, the non-cyclists following and supporting in a campervan. If you had to put money on who was to finish, the campervan or Sonnish, it would be wise to back the guy on the bike. ■
Hamburgefintsiv
The route, a break, two brakes and a stage win
25
Beautiful Island – Wonderful People Tonny’s Tip Top Taiwan Task Tonny Møller has spent much of his life overseas – he’s sailed on most of them. Now he spends much of his life overseeing. He has project managed the three biggest jewels in the Maersk Training simulation crown, in Svendborg, Dubai and Houston, and now has, potentially, the largest venture in his sights. However it is not one that will carry Maersk’s seven-pointed star.
26
M
aersk Training has been chosen to be ‘the midwife’ to a huge educational complex in Taiwan. In terms of eventual size it dwarfs all Tonny’s other projects. The Taiwanese government through its Department of Energy was looking for a partner for its Metal Industries Research & Development Centre to help man and establish a training complex for the country’s fastgrowing wind energy industry. The Taiwanese looked around and decided to buy-in on Maersk Training’s forty years of experience. The MIRDC itself has origins going back to 1963, but wind and training for the industry opens a new sector in their impressively broad portfolio. Taiwan has relied on coal and nuclear to power its homes and massive industrial demands, but with a need to import its coal along with the extra uncertainties of nuclear in a region of the world that experiences earthquakes, wind has become an ever-more attractive option. At one point in
its history Taiwan was named Formosa by the Portuguese, meaning beautiful island, the intention is for it to remain so.
come in. Their expertise has been employed, not only to oversee building work fulfill Global Wind Organisation’s standards, but also to make sure that the right people are reading the right things and using the right equipment.
In terms of capacity, in 2000 the entire country, under ideal conditions could only produce 2.6MW -that was less than the output of one of today’s offshore turbines. By 2010 it had risen to 475.9MW and now with the announcement last spring of 11 new wind farms they intend to add a further 738MW to the current figure of 692.3MW. However by 2025 they want the eleven new fields alone to produce 3,836MW of an overall total of 5.5GW. To put that in perspective, that total is what Denmark currently produces, it is about 40% of the UK’s and 10% of Germany’s. However the rate of growth in Taiwan will be amongst the fastest on earth.
GWO ACCREDITATION The Maersk team will supply the entire training equipment required by the Global Wind Organisation, along with accreditation, and will select and train the instructors who will be at the forefront of the operation once it goes into fully training mode. They will also set up a GMS and booking system along with doing internal audits for two years to maintain standards and then upon completion in May 2020, provide online support for the rest of that year. ‘We made a job profile, of what a good instructor should look like and from the hundreds of translated CV’s we interviewed 42 to find the 30 best qualified. That thirty went to Newcastle in
It is a power revolution that will require a whole new army of technicians to keep it up and running. That is partly were Tonny and his team of five colleagues 27
England in three batches for Basic Safety Training,’ says Tonny. Only two failed the course and then twelve were picked to become the first batch of train-the-trainers instructors. The remainder will help fill the technical manpower gap that potentially exists. Tonny was very impressed with the dedication of the participants. He is now a regular visitor to MIRDC in Kaohsiung City, in the southern part of the country. ‘I’d visit Taiwan many times as a seafarer, , but these occasions let me get to know the people. They are really wonderful, so friendly happy and helpful. I’m very impressed.’ Taiwan is an economic miracle. From an island in need of aid in the 1950’s, to the world’s largest supplier of contract electronics, it has seen a transition that has elevated it to be one of the Asian Tigers alongside Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia.
Maersk Training CEO Johan Uggla and Dr. Lin, Chiu-Feng, President, MIRDCÂ officially sign the cooperation
Hamburgefintsiv
A tour round a very old windpowered device, 171 years old!
28
The signatory party, Tonny is second from right It is like Denmark in that it needs to import nearly all of its raw materials, in Taiwan’s case, 90%. It is a vibrant nation on the cusp of continuous change and the need to re-evaluate itself. Today it stands on the same cliff edge that most developed nations have at some time stood upon – the point where your greatest assess, your workforce, having enjoyed a financial revolution, is better paid and through that economic factor alone, is no longer the most potent weapon in your armory. Now other countries line-up to offer production at lower costs. The Taiwanese government recognized early on that its greatest natural resource was in the space between its people’s ears. It is an observation once made by the author Henrik Stangerup of his fellow Danes. Perhaps that is why it lead the MIRDC to go into collaboration with Maersk Training.
training institution was in how we thought the project could be best operated with a reduction in personnel compared to what they had estimated,’ explains Tonny who is typically in Kaohsiung about once a month. ‘We different cultures, but we want to attain the same thing with renewables. We are both going in the same direction, only we have been going a little longer and we are happy that the knowledge we have can be reused and developed.’ In November there was a referendum with ten questions being put to the country. The questions fell into two categories, one about same sex marriage and rights and the other about reducing the reliance on coal and nuclear energy. On the table was the option to reduce coal by one percent a year and not to build any more fossil powered generating stations and to continue the aim to be nuclear free by 2025. ■
‘What I think attracted them to our view on how to set up the 29
Best/Worst Wedding Gift Ever Depending on whether or not you are British or Danish Regardless of the political divorce that is Brexit. The settlement pales into insignificance when you look a deal struck between the kingdoms of Denmark and Scotland a while back. A long while back. In real estate terms it is right up there with Dutchman Peter Minuit buying Manhattan in 1626 for a handful of beads and trinkets and the Germans swooping the 1.7 sq kilometres of Heligoland for huge chunks of Africa in 1890.
T
he Danish Scottish deal goes back a little further. In 1468 the daughter of King Christian
I of Denmark and Norway was betrothed to marry King James III of Scotland. It was a matter of pride and tradition that Princess Margaret should have a dowry – a financial gift to ease the uncertainly of arranged marriages.
embarrassed when it came round to the dowry, the gift of land or money to represent a daughter’s worth. The marriage was partially to repair relations over a tax argument between Scotland and Denmark, but still Christian had to come up with some money. Effectively he pawned the Danish possessions of the Orkney and Shetland Islands, giving them to Scotland until he could raise the cash. He failed to do so in the two years he was given and the two groups of islands merged into the Scottish crown.
Margaret was by all accounts a good looker and plain James should have paid for her. She was a loyal wife and an astute royal, but drew the line at sex. It is recorded that she only did it to secure a successor to James. So once.
There is an argument that the debt is still open and that if Denmark were to repay it today, the islands would again become
Christian I of Scandinavia, since Norway and Sweden were Danish at the time, was a bit financially
30
Danish. The Orkney’s would cost $734,000 and Shetlands $177,360 at today’s prices. So Margaret’s dowry was a reasonable one, until that was the spring of 1964 when the UK drew up the boundaries of exploration and fishing with the Continental Shelf Act. It’s a map that would look very different today if the two island groups were flying the Dannebrog. Denmark could be the single richest country in Europe, per head perhaps the world. So Margaret’s dowry was perhaps the most expensive wedding gift of all time. There is an irony that in Danish gift is the word for marriage, and poison. ■
As it might have been
As is
31
A trio of accessible security courses from two leading maritime educational facilities It’s the learning equivalent of online meals, where your week’s daily diet is delivered to your door, leaving you free to devote time to other things – here it is online learning where the end-product is a
T
certificate that enables your career to develop without you having to dramatically break away from your routine. You can take the course virtually anywhere, anytime.
he key to a MCA-backed initiative through Maersk Training in cooperation with Manchester-based online specialists, Virtual Training Centre, is the fact that courses such as Proficiency as Ship Security Officer (SSO), Proficiency in Designated Security Duties
32
(PDSD) and Proficiency in Security Awareness (PSA) can be taken anywhere your computer has reliable Wi-Fi access, and that the end result is certification from one of the most prominent and respected maritime organizations. The marketplace has numerous options through traditional
something in action has a proven plus effect in learning over just reading. Video sticks in the mind.
classrooms and e-learning, but this collaboration is thought to be the first that frees the student from the need to attend a physical test centre, a need that often involves job disruption and travel and hotel expenses as everything is fully online. You can also go
in and out of these courses as your time or schedule dictates, allowing for other commitments. The courses are often a little longer than normal purely due to the inclusion of instructional or situa tional video, a bonus because seeing
33
test questions and an official final assessment and they are certified by the UK DfT Maritime & Coastguard Agency (MCA).
Training in Security Awareness (PSA) is approximately four hours, and this course must be undertaken by anyone who works on or frequents a ship often. The Designated Security Duties (PDSD) Course is approximately 8 hours and must be taken by anyone performing security-related duties under the Ship Security Plan (SSP).
The need for certification was established by the International Maritime Organization following 9-11 and subsequent attacks on vessels. It is a mandatory code and it demands that every ship must have an onboard Ship Security Officer who works alongside the Company Security Officer (CSO).
The Ship Security Officer (SSO) Course is approximately 21 hours in duration, split into 3 separate modules to make learning easier. The SSO’s role is that of onboard tutor and police officer in all manners of security. Each of these courses includes confirmation
The ISPS code came into effect in 2004 but has had subsequent revisions. These virtual courses naturally include those changes, another value of the process being on-line as opposed to the information being locked into a burnt disc. ■
Hamburgefintsiv
Chris Jacques regularly gets pay cheques from two very different sources, for two very different lines of work, one totally embracing safety and one with a reputation of madness. They share the common factor that both are based on working in diverse locations.
Rig Gigs
A double-life that’s safe and sound
T
he regular cheque finds Chris working as an On Board Training Manager for Maersk Training, taking the message of sensible and safe practice to wherever it is needed. He has conducted courses on rigs, in offices, in hotels and even on one occasion on a picnic table.
The second, more inconsistent cheque, finds him banging drums, in intimate clubs and huge stadiums several times a week. The world of a drummer is far removed from the confines of conservative behaviour. In any band the drummer is likely to be the eccentric, the one who is up with the beat on stage, but offbeat in life. Not that Chris is in anyway 34
a mad drummer. He is as stable as they get – 44, married and with four daughters he lives in Lafayette, the centre of a culture that is unique in sound, voice and taste, Cajun.
is all about food and music. You can plan your holidays in Louisiana around the festivals, the bands the food. I’m a huge fan of the culture, but not of the Cajun accent,’ says Chris.
‘My family comes from the Alsace Lorraine region near the German border. I’m proud of my Cajun heritage. Down here (Louisiana) it
The Washington Post created a map with the boundaries to what it argued were the 24 regional accents of the United States,
Chris’s tones don’t seem to belong to any one of them. ‘Standing in a room in front of 30 people from different nationalities and cultures, you have to speak clearly without the use of a lot of crutch words and I worked on that a lot and getting rid of the little eccentricities of the Cajun accent that people like.’ Chris was just 14 when he walked on stage for his first professional gig, and has now performed in front of audiences of 10,000, so walking into a teaching situation he already knew he had conquered the principal fear of most instructors. With the drums he plays rock, country, blues, zydeco and a lot more. There is also a huge variation in safety as to where the instruction takes place. KNOWLEDGE TRUCK ‘The strangest place I’ve given a class is on the back of a forklift in Port Fourchon– there were no rooms available so we rigged up my laptop on the forklift,’ he
remembers. ‘Training on location can be extremely comfortable for everyone just by being in the right setting. For me with training on board there is a whole world. You have guys in familiar settings so they are already comfortable and when they are comfortable you are really getting the best out of them. They are not in a foreign place, in a classroom where they are uncomfortable and not sure of how to react or what’s supposed to happen. So you already have the barriers broken down, you are in their place their setting – it’s like hanging out with a bunch of buddies, relaying information and having discussions.’
Chris at work The Maersk Drilling Valiant Speeches on Behavioural Based Safety for Safety Leaders seminar for Maersk Drilling, Conoco Philips, and Marathon
The Skandi Constructor IADC RigPass, Medic First Aid, Incipient Firefighting, Working/Rescue at Heights, Hazmat, and Helicopter Landing Officer
One advantage to the customer in having onboard training is that they get a free assessment of their facilities. Chris remembers being asked to make good use of travel time when on a rig en-route to its location. He set up a rescue operation featuring a mannequin placed in a hold and he told the crew of the stricken guy. After three hours he was still lying there.
‘It was nuts, they had no idea where the equipment was. When they did find it, it was still all wrapped up with Danish instructions and nobody on the rig spoke Danish. By the time they worked it out the guy would have been long dead for sure.’ 35
The Skandi Inspector IADC RigPass, Medic First Aid, Incipient Firefighting, Working/ Rescue at Heights, Hazmat, and Helicopter Landing Officer, Competency Assessments
It was an exercise which indicated the way to better practices. It was a win-win-win scenario, for the participant, the company and for Chris who gained an insight into an actual situation. It was a safety not musical performance, for the drummer, it was a gig on the rig. ■
Poopdeck 33
Message In A Bottle ‘Probably the World’s Best Beer’ is a masterful bit of marketing. ‘The Most Delicious Water on Earth’ is not. The boast sticks in the throat, not the water or the price. I’ve a bit of a thing about the tags proclaiming ‘best’. Sure Denmark has undeniably the world’s best handball team since they saw off the rest. Even the claim of the Boston Red Sox to be World Series Champions is correct, if a little misleading since the competition is confined to American teams, but how can you justify labelling something ‘the most delicious water on earth’?
T
aste is a matter of perception, palate and discrimination and accolades of this most delicious magnitude are down to, one presumes, a team of tasters. What qualifies them? Are they the undisputed world’s best tasters? If so, then the tag might just hold water. But only if the people nominating the world’s best tasters are the world’s best nominators. If not, how can you market something, ‘untouched for a thousand years’ as being the most delicious? There is lots of water out there, untouched and a lot more untasted.
Water is a fascinating subject. You dear reader are 55 to 60% water, depending whether or not you are female or male. You are a miracle, a walking talking puddle. Scientists are divided on where it came from, the water not you. There are two schools of thought – one is that it is the result of rehydration from rocks and the other that an icy comet or asteroid crash landed here. They are however pretty-well united in the estimation that it has been here on earth for no less than 3.8 billion years. That’s the one jaw dropping fact. That every single raindrop, every tear, every cup of coffee, pint of beer, glass of milk, has been on this planet, in some
36
form or other, for pretty well ever. What we’ve got, is what we have. We are not getting any more of it. So we have to take care of it. Seventy percent of the earth is covered in water, but if you were to gather it up into a single ball, it looks remarkably insignificant. All the salt water would be in a ball that is 1,385 kms in diameter – this sphere represents 96% of the water on earth. All the fresh, is just below 273 kms, but much of that is below ground and inaccessible. The bubble that supplies most of the world’s drinking water, from the lakes and rivers, is just 56 kms. It seems so tiny and insignificant, but
Poopdeck 33
remember it is a sphere, so as a single raindrop it is 56 kms tall. You’d need an umbrella. It is from that imaginary sphere that virtually every tap runs, and every bottle of water is filled. And there are a lot of them. A reasonable estimate from a body called the Fine Water Academy is that there are at least 3,988 different brands of still, spring or sparkling water. Of course the water differs as much as the labelling. It is a faucet of nature. Water is a precious, irreplaceable resource. In its life a teardrop has almost certainly been a snowflake, run in a river, been a miniscule part of a sea, floated on high as a cloud. Undoubtedly it has been so innumerable times. It’s taken you about three minutes to reach this part. In that time three million plastic bottles
have been bought, out of which only nine in every hundred will be recycled. The majority of the bottles are for water of some sort from Alpine pure to Fanta. The popularity of water might be its, and our, downfall. A university study showed that one third of the fish caught in UK waters contained plastic and another in Belgium found that people who regularly eat fish, ingest up to 11,000 tiny pieces of plastic each year. Not that that’s a problem, the bottles are normally made from polyethylene terephthalate (Pet), and that decomposes naturally in a mere 400 years. One estimate is that by 2050 there will be more plastic by weigh than fish in the world’s oceans. You can see why ‘The Most Delicious Water on Earth’ can stick in the throat. ■ Precious thought. If all the water in the world were to be gathered into one drop, this would be it. Illustration showing all of Earth’s water, liquid fresh water, and water in lakes and rivers. Credit: Howard Perlman, USGS/ illustraion by Jack Cook, WHOI. 37
Contact Editorial issues and suggestions: Richard Lightbody – esea@maersktraining.com Vanessa Dias – esea@maersktraining.com Names and emails of those able and eager to help with specific enquiries arising out of this issue Sales enquiries Aberdeen (UK): aberdeen@maersktraining.com Sales enquiries Brazil: riodejaneiro@maersktraining.com Sales enquiries Esbjerg (DK): esbjerg@maersktraining.com Sales enquiries India: chennai@maersktraining.com mumbai@maersktraining.com Sales enquiries Malaysia: kualalumpur@maersktraining.com Sales enquiries Middle East: dubai@maersktraining.com Sales enquiries Newcastle (UK): newcastle@maersktraining.com Sales enquiries Norway: stavanger@maersktraining.com Sales enquiries Svendborg (DK): svendborg@maersktraining.com Sales enquiries United States houston@maersktraining.com
www.maersktraining.com
38