Drill platform puts 800 jobs in pipeline
Nov 7 2006 By Rebekah Ashby, The Journal
Up to 800 jobs could be created - and maintained in the North-East for six years - on the back of a massive £300m fabrication contract heading to the region.
The Journal reported yesterday how new life is set to be breathed into a North-East shipyard after plans were announced for an enormous floating drilling platform for the oil and gas sector to be built at Haverton Hill, near Billingham.
The contract has been awarded to the Tees Alliance Group by Cayman Islands-based Sea Dragon Offshore and will be the biggest non-military marine fabrication project in the UK.
And the Tees Alliance Group said last night it is confident it will go on to win work on a second, and perhaps even a third, rig - creating up to 800 jobs on Teesside for five or six years.
The yard will take delivery of the rig's sub-structure from Sevmash shipyard in Russia and expect to deliver it in 2009.
Tees Alliance Group CEO David Eason said: "SeaDragon 1 will create up to 500 jobs, which we will begin recruiting for after Christmas, but I believe they are going to take up the option on SeaDragon 2.
"We have some hard work to do to deliver the first rig and then convince them that we can make the sub-structure to the same quality as Russia.
"We have always had the skill here, it has never gone away and if it has it will be coming home as soon as we start this job."
The Tees Alliance Group is an association made up of Tees Alliance Group Ltd, which is based at the yard, Darlington's Cleveland Bridge and Middlesbrough-based Sarens Cranes.
Mr Eason said: "We will start work on the yard over the next few weeks to get the state of repair up to a standard where it's fit for purpose. The topside work on the rig will start next March or April so that's when work will really start on the yard.
"We won the work by convincing SeaDragon and SeaDragon's financiers and operator KCA DEUTAG that we had the capabilities and the skills here on Teesside to put this rig together.
"We started banging this Teesside drum two years ago and SeaDragon picked up on it 14 or 15 months ago."
The last project carried out at Haverton Hill was for Kawasaki. Four years ago it built a tunnel boring machine for the Channel Tunnel Rail link.
Ray Thompson, sector projects manager at One NorthEast, said: "If we can bring some of the facilities we have in the North-East back into use, and get workers back into traditional engineering jobs, we'll put the region in a strong position to maximise opportunities in the future."
