The National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA) announced that Oceaneering and Danos are the winners of the 2020 NOIA Safety in Seas Awards competition. Oceaneering was selected for the 2020 NOIA Safety in Seas Safety Practice Award, and Danos is recognized for the 2020 NOIA Safety in Seas Culture of Safety Award.

The Safety Practice Award recognizes specific technologies, approaches, methods or projects with direct and demonstrable impacts on improving safety. The Culture of Safety Award honors overall organizational immersion in and commitment to safety, which has resulted in remarkable, measurable and sustained safety performance over a prolonged period of time.

Oceaneering is recognized for the Safety Practice Award for its Liberty E-ROV resident subsea vehicle. The E-ROV is piloted fully from onshore, eliminating the need for ROV and vessel personnel to travel to and from offshore, which reduces work in higher-risk environments. The E-ROV has led to a 75 percent reduction in topside support vessel and crew support, as well as a reduction of 1,400 tons of CO2 emissions. The E-ROV concept also increases the applications for other ROV systems and deployments, including subsea sensors, pumping systems and monitoring equipment.

Danos is recognized for the Culture of Safety Award for establishing an institutional safety culture through behavior-based safety programs and innovations like virtual reality to enhance worker training and augmented reality to improve work processes. Despite Danos employees logging a company record 8.9 million man-hours (a 35 percent increase over the previous high), Danos recorded a total recordable incident rate (TRIR) of 0.11, another company best.

The award-winning entries from Oceaneering and Danos were evaluated by an independent panel of judges from the U.S. Coast Guard, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, and an industry safety consultant.  There were 14 applications from 13 companies between the two Safety in Seas categories. 

NOIA has held the SIS awards competition since 1978 to recognize those who contribute to improving the safety of life in the offshore energy industry.  The awards are sponsored by Compass Publications, publisher of Sea Technology.