Coronavirus: The impact on offshore travelling

Have you been affected by coronavirus? With major energy companies introducing travel bans to protect employees as major outbreaks of the virus are detected across the world, it’s hard to see how things won’t continue to be impacted.

While the debate over whether this is truly a pandemic continues with the World Health Organisation arguing the facts don’t fit the classification, the energy sector – where international travel and close contact with colleagues is part of the working day – is paying close attention. And it’s critical that we all play our part in supporting the authorities in their work to contain the spread of the virus.

UK Oil and Gas has warned workers who’ve recently travelled to high-risk areas not to travel offshore. It even goes further and has recommended that operators think about banning anyone who has been in a lower-risk area.

Where’s high risk?

• Wuhan Province (in China)
• Areas of South Korea and northern Italy and Iran

If you’ve travelled there – the UKOG says you can’t travel offshore

Where’s lower risk?

• The list is changing so do your research too but we’re talking about Japan and Malaysia

If you’ve been to these places – you might not be able to go offshore in the North Sea. This applies even if you’re not displaying symptoms.

What if you feel fine?

This is tricky – if you’ve ever had the flu, you’ll know how epically bad you feel. And this can happen with this one too of course. The mortality levels are around 3,000. But people can have this coronavirus and no non-symptomatic or have very minor symptoms as if you feel like you’re about to get ill, but it never manifests.

Who has stopped people from travelling?

Orsted and Vestas are restricting their people from traveling. Vestas commented: The safety and wellbeing of our employees is our highest priority and we are taking all necessary precautions. We are monitoring the situation and ready to act to mitigate any potential impact on our operations.”

There’s no doubt that this is going to have a huge knock-on effect on the energy sector. Wood Mackenzie has already warned that COVID-19 (the virus’s official name) had “brought much of China’s wind turbine component production to a standstill.”

Developers in China are trying to finish projects by the end of the year I order to be eligible for subsidies from the government. Xiaoyang Li, a senior consultant from Wood Mackenzie, said if it was brought under control over the next few months, it might be possible for some components to recover in subsequent quarters but that the company was estimating a decrease in wind installations in China of up to 50% compared to Q4 2019. “In a best-case scenario, the epidemic is contained and production resumes by the end of March. In a bear-case, the epidemic could continue to impact the supply chain well into the middle of the year.”

If you have travelled abroad to a high- or low-risk area and feel unwell, NHS advice is to call 111.