Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME) and Sembcorp Marine look set to battle it out for Chevron’s Rosebank FPSO newbuilding.
The contest between the South Korean and Singapore yards is said to be “too close to call”, according to TradeWinds’ sister publication Upstream.
South Korea’s two other major shipbuilders, Hyundai Heavy Industries and Samsung Heavy Industries, are both said to have been dropped as options.
DSME will likely “pull out all the stops” to win the deal, according to Upstream, given that it lost out to Sembcorp Marine for Equinor’s Johan Castberg FPSO last year.
The Rosebank FPSO is set for deployment in the harsh waters 80 miles northwest of the Shetland Islands in water depths of 3,600 feet.
South Korea’s top three shipbuilders have been facing intense competition from yards in China and Singapore for these major offshore projects.
In April this year South Korean yards missed out on BP’s $1bn Tortue FPSO newbuilding with the contract going to TechnipFMC and subcontractor Cosco.
Nomura shipbuilding analyst Jaehyung Choi said at the time that this was “negative news” for the Koreans as there was no history of Chinese yards building a FPSO top-side module.
Choi said that global oil majors were trying to diversify their client base, and one of the processes that oil majors could be testing is whether non-Korean shipbuilders could build offshore projects such as an FPSO.
However, he said that South Korean shipbuilders are “far along the learning curve” in terms of building experience of diverse offshore projects over the past four-to-five years, while Chinese and Singaporean yards lack that experience.
However, Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) and DSME have not landed a single offshore newbuilding project since 2014.
