With the once booming offshore oil and gas market in crisis, once highly profitable PSVs (Platform Supply Vessels) are lying idle worldwide.
Damen Shipyards has suggested a solution could be conversion of these in to alternative specialist vessels.
It has produced workable designs across a number of industries suggesting that a laid up PSV can become into a profitable Container Feeder, a Logistic Support Vessel for naval operations, an accommodation and O&M vessel or even a Live Fish Carrier.
For a PSV owner there would certainly still be many more practicalities to overcome than just the conversion, not least finding a customer for such a specialist vessel, deciding who pays for the conversion and of course the significant hit they will take to the price they once paid for their PSV.
However, this type of ‘out of the box’ thinking is perhaps something our beleaguered industry should take notice of.
We need to find some way of keeping money flowing through the shipping industry. Keeping doing the same as before and expecting a different result is simply not going to work.
If this type of practical thinking was applied to more of our problems perhaps we would gradually see new shoots of commercial opportunity growing industry-wide.
