The North Sea oil industry is a turbulent one. That offers North Sea divers great highs and costly lows, not to mention lots of pressure
paid professional, Sean Cann has a decidedly small office. The isolated, pressurised steel chamber where he sometimes spends 28 days straight is about the size of a caravan. Crammed in with five other people, he receives meals through an airlock in between shifts. And although Mr Cann may be only a few hundred miles from his home in Fort William, in western Scotland, he cannot get back safely for up to a week, such is the time needed for his body to decompress.
But by no means every year is perfect in the oil-and-gas business. The North Sea industry has recently been through one of its biggest-ever busts. After the oil-price crash in 2014-16, when a barrel of Brent crude fell from $115 to below $30, companies slashed their costs. Last year saw the least drilling in the North Sea since 1965. The number of jobs supported by Britain’s oil-and-gas industry fell by nearly 40% in three years, from 460,000 in 2014 to 280,000 in 2017.
That optimism isn’t shared by most divers, who saw only a “very intermittent” pickup in 2018 following “almost no work” in the previous three years, says Mr Molloy. “We hear a lot about green shoots. But the diving community say they haven’t seen any significant change.” One frogman says many colleagues are “up to their eyeballs in debt, relying on that next job coming in. If they don’t get it, they lose their house, their car.
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