Wintermar director Marc Thompson said the shortage of Indonesian crew was “quite well known” especially for those operating larger DP1 or DP2 vessels.
Under cabotage rules that have been rolled out progressively for the offshore sector since 2011 Indonesian crew are required to work onboard.
“Certainly when we grew quite quickly at the start of last year our biggest challenge was: can we find these people and do they exist?” Thompson told the Mare Forum Indonesia conference last week.
One of the strategies that has seen success for Wintermar is to attract Indonesian crew working in the Middle East or major regional owners in Asia to come and work back home.
“Talking to some of the Indonesian crews they do prefer to work in Indonesia rather than working abroad, even if they’re earning lower salaries as they are closer to loved ones and they are to get home quickly. We have to try and attract that talent back as the training these crew have been getting from the international operators mean they do have the right type of people,” he explained.
Some other international owners with joint ventures in Indonesia have opted to employ Indonesian crews along with foreign technical advisors to guide and teach them.
With the rapidly rising wages for Filipino seafarers in the offshore sector in recent years, many international operators had turned to countries such as Indonesia as an alternative. However, as Indonesia faces its own domestic crew shortage wage rates are likely to rise. “I think its inevitable crew costs will rise you’ve got a closed market,” Thompson said.
The market is set to get even tighter as cabotage is extended to more complex vessel types.
“Going forward as the cabotage closes into some of the more complex vessels, we’re talking about subsea, or IMR (inspection, maintenance and repair) vessels you get into a whole new ball game where you get very delicate operations that are written into large levels of liability in oil company contracts then you really need specialists,” he explained. Whether Indonesia has such crew, or certainly sufficient numbers, remains open to question.
Putting even further pressure on the domestic crewing market will be when cabotage is extended to cover drilling rigs. “That requires another level of specialty and we don’t know if the manpower exists in Indonesia in significant enough numbers.”
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