NHV Aberdeen Scoops New Offshore Contract
The NHV Group today announced a new contract with Seaway Heavy Lifting (SHL) to provide helicopter services in support of their upcoming wind farm construction project at the Beatrice Offshore Wind farm.
The 588MW, 84 turbine wind farm, will be situated in the Outer Moray Firth and is expected to power approximately 450,000 homes. The operations are expected to start in Q2 2017. Flights will depart from NHV’s base in Aberdeen to the Beatrice Wind farm, which is approximately 80nm from Aberdeen.
The £2.6bn Beatrice Offshore Windfarm Ltd (BOWL) project has been given the green light for construction by owners SSE (40%), Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) (35%) and Red Rock Power Limited (25%) afterreachingFinancialCloseon23May2016. Theprojectwillbeoneofthelargestprivateinvestments ever made in Scottish infrastructure.
NHV will support this project utilizing the state-of-the-art H175 aircraft, an Airbus Helicopter’s Super Medium type. The H175 is specifically designed to meet evolving mission needs in the energy sector. Being the launching operator for this aircraft type, NHV’s H175s have accumulated extensive experience in the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Ghana and Denmark since 2014. NHV Group ultimately will increase its fleet to 16 of these new-generation helicopters.
NHV started operating out of Aberdeen at the beginning of 2016 and announced the opening of a new hangar, apron and passenger handling facilities last October.
NHV have been supporting Seaway Heavy Lifting since 2013 across a number of projects. NHV’s base manager Jamie John commented: “We are very happy to announce the strengthening of our long standing partnership with Seaway Heavy Lifting and support them in the construction of the new Beatrice Offshore wind farm project. Our brand new facilities and aircraft will offer a fantastic platform for them to support their operations in the Moray Firth over the next 18 months.”
The NHV group, based in Ostend Belgium, is specialized in B-to-B helicopter services and has a strong geographic presence in Europe and Western Africa. The group conducts operations out of several bases on the two continents with a team of over 550 employees. NHV’s main focus is on the oil and gas industry.
Aside from the helicopter operations, NHV is also an approved training organization (ATO) and an official service center for our partner Airbus Helicopters. The group has a multipurpose high value fleet of 65 helicopters. Since 2012, NHV has ordered 16 helicopters of the state-of-the-art Airbus Helicopters H175 model and is the global launching customer to fly the H175.
