Subsea UK Awards Winners - Proserv, ToolTec, Tracero, Alf Leadbitter & Alan Muirhead

This year’s Subsea Expo was a record-breaking event with almost 9,000 recorded visits by 6,500 registered delegates over the three days, Subsea UK reported.


Europe’s largest annual subsea exhibition and conference and Aberdeen’s second largest event after Offshore Europe, broke all records this year with a 23% increase in attendees and 200 exhibitors.


The outstanding achievements and innovative technologies devised by some of the country’s leading subsea companies over the past 12 months were recognised at Subsea UK Awards.


The gala event, which was attended by over 850 people, closed the opening day of Subsea Expo and was sponsored by Forum Energy Technologies, Costain Upstream, Genesis and SETS.



Caption: Nick Rettie, Director of ToolTec at the Subsea UK Awards Ceremony.


Energy services company, Proserv, was crowned company of the year in the category sponsored by 3sun Group and RRC Controls. During the past 12 months, Proserv marked a number of key milestones including a series of high-profile contract awards across the globe, expanding its manufacturing facilities and launching a new subsea technology. Proserv also secured major investment to help ensure its future sustainable growth and success.


David Lamont, CEO at Proserv, said: “It is a real privilege to win this award particularly during what has been a very challenging time for the industry. Against this backdrop, we have continued to evolve through a robust business strategy focused upon building on our market-leading position, track record and delivery of world-class products and services.


“At Proserv we work as a team and I see this award as recognition of the hard work of everyone throughout the company in building our business to where we are today.”


Commercial diving veteran, Alf Leadbitter, from The Underwater Centre in Fort William, received the award for outstanding contribution to the subsea industry. Leadbitter’s career spans more than 50 years as a commercial diver, dive supervisor, instructor and assessor. He has worked at The Underwater Centre for more than 30 years, the last ten of which have been as a diver training authority.


Leadbitter said: “I feel absolutely honoured and privileged to have won this award; to be acknowledged in such a way for doing a job that I enjoy so much is very special indeed. I’ve been lucky to have a career that has required me to travel the globe, both as a diver and a trainer.”


Tracerco was selected for the Simmons & Co sponsored Innovation & Technology award in recognition of the success of its Discovery technology, which has been hailed as a major break-through in subsea pipeline inspection. For the first time oil companies using the technology can non-intrusively inspect complex subsea flowlines for both flow assurance issues and integrity flaws from the outside of the pipe without removing any protective and insulation coatings.


Lee Robins, Tracero’s head of subsea services, said: “Our ethos is to strive for technical excellence in order to add value to our customers, and Discovery is an excellent example of how our research and development team is able to work with our customers to create a technology solution that overcomes their most significant challenges.”


Express Engineering Oil & Gas secured the global exports award sponsored by Aberdeenshire Council. The company has a number of global frame agreements for subsea products and regularly exports to Malaysia, Brazil, Norway, Singapore, USA, Azerbaijan, Angola and Nigeria. Its export revenues have grown from £6.9m to £19m in the last three years.


The new enterprise award, sponsored by Apache North Sea, was presented to ToolTec. Formed in 2013, the firm has four employees and seven major subsea companies as clients. Over the past 12 months, ToolTec has doubled its workshop and now has a large storage yard and tank testing for subsea equipment. The company provides ROV tooling solutions and equipment refurbishment related to Work Class ROVs and Tether Management Systems (TMS), such as bespoke workclass ROV tooling skids, interface bracketry and tooling deployment systems for survey equipment, standard ROV tooling such as torque tools, wire cutters, grinders, soft line cutters, flying lead deployments frames and independent ROV mounted hydraulic power units.





Alan Muirhead of Ingen Ideas scooped the emerging young talent award, sponsored by Bibby Offshore. Having joined the company as a graduate, Alan has assumed a mentoring role for all new graduates at Ingen Ideas and is heavily involved in their continual development. His technical contribution to the business and his dedication to the next generation of engineers were recognised by the judges.


Neil Gordon, chief executive of Subsea UK, said: “The number and standard of entries we received for this year’s awards would surprise many who were unaware of the numerous success stories we have had over the past 12 months.


“There have been some wonderful achievements in what has been a difficult period for many of our members. Times like these do present opportunities and the firms recognised tonight are amongst those that have the capacity to provide the innovation, talent and leadership to steer our industry through the challenges ahead.”

Location: Aberdeen, United Kingdom