The recent published EY report (Ernst & Young – Dutch Oilfield Services Analysis, 2018) shows the importance of the offshore industry to the Port of Rotterdam, the company said in its release.
As mentioned in the article; Rotterdam is the largest and most important cluster in the Netherlands. The port and city harbors several of the largest offshore companies active in the Netherlands, mainly due to two reasons.
First, the Port of Rotterdam provides an access point for the offshore industry. Second, the Rotterdam region is home to a wide array of storage, refining and transport assets for the oil and gas sector as a whole.
The refineries of integrated oil and gas companies are situated in the Port of Rotterdam and surrounded by the oil storage infrastructure, indicating the importance of Rotterdam as the hub of a large part of the downstream oil and gas infrastructure.
The importance of offshore to the Netherlands as a whole is illustrated by the significant number of companies located outside of the Rotterdam area: the Noord-Brabant region, for example, with its active cluster of family businesses.
The first three months of the year, the Port of Rotterdam registered a large amount of calls by offshore vessels. Statistics show in particular a large amount of heavy load, semi sub & crane vessels compared to other ports. Examples of vessels that enter the Port of Rotterdam in Q1 are the Bokalift 1, Gulliver, Pioneering Spirit and the Seaway Strashnov. These vessels mainly enter to port for (de)mobilization and project related activities such as the installation of platforms and windfarms.
The Business Analytics and Intelligence department of the Port of Rotterdam Authority has built the Offshore Activity Monitor. This monitor tracks all offshore ships and records where they are located.
Q1 2019 proves again that the Rotterdam region receives the largest number of offshore vessels of all Dutch seaports.
All figures concern unique ship calls. In addition, all offshore vessels are shown excluding Crew Transfer Vessels & Dredging vessels. This is due to distorted imaging (example: In Rotterdam there were around 3200 calls from dredging vessels in 2018).