The Hindu Business Line : Deep-sea divers raking in the moolah

Mumbai, April 25 They are mostly under-graduates or just graduates, but command a salary as high as $15,000 a month. They are much sought after by companies such as ONGC and Reliance.

Only, their work place is not in plush air-conditioned corporate offices, but in the hostile depths of the ocean about 300 metres below the surface.

Trained underwater divers are much in demand for carrying out various underwater tasks for offshore oil exploration and production (E&P) companies.

Increased offshore E&P activities have resulted in a severe shortage of qualified underwater divers, with ONGC and Reliance being forced to either pay a higher price for their services or source divers from abroad.

Divers are employed by the offshore oil and gas industry for underwater works like exploring and surveying sites, building, repairing, inspecting and maintenance of drilling platforms and pipelines.

Requirements

Industry sources said there is a requirement of about 2,000 saturation divers alone within the Indian oil and gas industry, which includes companies such as ONGC, IOC, Reliance and Cairn Energy. But, there are hardly 200 to 250 such divers in the country, with about 20 per cent of the divers moving to West Asia and South-East Asia on more lucrative contracts.

There are three kinds of deep-sea diving — air diving, mixed gas diving and saturation diving.

In air diving, the medium for breathing is compressed air and the diver can work at water depths of up to 50 metres.

For water depths ranging between 30 and 75 metres, mixed gas diving is deployed, with the medium for breathing being a mixture of helium (about 90 per cent) and oxygen (about 10 per cent).

Saturation diving is considered to be a safe and preferred way of diving at water depths beyond 70 metres up to a maximum of 300 metres below sea level.

But the process here is rather tedious, as the divers have to live in special pressurised chamber for about four weeks so that their bodies get ‘saturated’.

From this chamber, the diver is transported to the deck in a pressurised bell, which is then lowered into the sea. The saturation diver can work up to a maximum of four hours on the sea bed.

Freelance work

Says Mr Navpreet Singh, Joint Managing Director of Dolphin Offshore Ltd: “Divers mostly work as freelancers. And the wages range from Rs 1,500 to Rs 3,500 a day for air diving to as high as Rs 25,000 a day for deep-water saturation divers.” Dolphin Offshore sends trainees abroad to learn commercial diving.

In fact, the wages of divers have seen a jump of nearly 60 to 75 per cent in the last one year in the wake of a shortage in trained divers.

The problem in India is accentuated by the fact that there is no full-fledged saturation diving training institute — only the Navy has set up an air diving facility in Kochi, which has been accredited by the International Marine Contractors Association.

“So, prospective commercial divers have to get their training abroad. Currently, the cost of training abroad ranges from Rs 6 lakh for air diving to Rs 9 lakh for saturation diving. Locally, the training provided by the Indian Navy costs Rs 2.5 lakh, but it is only for air diving,” Mr Singh said.

With oil exploration activities set to increase on the back of rising crude prices, the Government and the industry are considering setting up a diving training institute in Chennai.

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