NEWS

THE PLATFORM BEHIND PROJECT MASTERThe most interesting part of Project MASTER is the part you can’t see.

Our story starts with the rise of the North Sea offshore industry, the Piper Alpha disaster and the pioneering Ulstein UT vessel designs that transformed offshore shipbuilding. Together, these events shaped a new generation of Emergency Response and Rescue Vessels (ERRVs): ships engineered not for comfort, but for endurance and the ability to operate when others could not.
ERRVs had been field-proven by the realities of offshore operations and emergency response long before the platform became the foundation for Project MASTER.

THE OFFSHORE REVOLUTION
The genesis of Project MASTER is deeply intertwined with twentieth-century industrial growth and was driven by the need to create a highly specialized class of vessels capable of withstanding conditions once considered beyond the limits of conventional ship design.
World War I was the first major global conflict in which oil became a decisive strategic resource. Although a handful of offshore oil fields were developed during the interwar years, offshore drilling expanded dramatically after World War II. One of the foremost regions was the Gulf of Mexico, which pioneered deepwater jack-up rigs, purpose-built crew boats and offshore supply vessels.
In Europe, offshore exploration received greater legal certainty thanks to the 1958 UN Convention on the Continental Shelf, which entered into force in 1964 and established coastal states' rights over seabed resources.
The first major commercial oil discovery on the Norwegian was made Continental Shelf—the Ekofisk field—by Phillips Petroleum in 1969. It proved a boon for oil-producing nations during the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, which drove up prices sharply while revolutionizing the economics of North Sea development.
The North Sea discoveries demanded vessels capable of operating in some of the world's harshest offshore conditions and the flat-bottomed, shallow-draft vessels originally imported from the Gulf of Mexico struggled in the punishing North Atlantic environment. The demand for innovative, purpose-built solutions was pressing. Enter Sigmund Borgundvåg, a Norwegian naval architect at Ulstein Trading determined to rewrite the rules of offshore safety and capability.

Interested in the full story? click the link below. Enjoy the read!
https://www.exploreryachtmaster.com/the-platform