According to the 2012 International Energy Agency report on trends of future energy demand and supply, there has been a decrease of atomic energy consumption and short-term increase of dependency on oil and gas energy since the accident at Fukushima D...
According to the 2012 International Energy Agency report on trends of future energy demand and supply, there has been a decrease of atomic energy consumption and short-term increase of dependency on oil and gas energy since the accident at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. It is estimated that oil prices will reach 100 dollars in 2020 due to the economic development and population growth of emerging economics such as China, India, and Brazil, which will lead to the gradual expansion of demand for deep sea oil well development. The prediction is supported by analysis agencies of the offshore plants market such as Douglass Westwood, which estimated that the offshore plants market would make rapid growth to reach approximately 320 billion dollars by 2020. Thus four South Korean shipyards(Hyundai Heavy Industries, Samsung Heavy Industries, Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering, and STX Offshore and Shipbuilding) are concentrating on winning orders for offshore plants rather than common merchant ships.
Compared with shipbuilding, which involves building a ship and completing its trial run on the shipyard and then delivering it to the ship owner, offshore plant construction is exposed to relatively much more risks. In case of accident in the course of construction, the loss is too immense for perpetrator to fully fulfill the liability requirements. Even if assured fulfills the liability requirements, the amount does not which may well lead to by the sufferer, which leads to a legal dispute in many cases. Thus there is an increasing need for liability insurance in terms of the supplementation of the property damage of the insured, security of financial compensation means, legal remedy of the sufferer, and social stability regarding the human and physical loss to a third party during an offshore plant construction. The insured especially need to buy the liability terms of offshore plant construction insurance in order to ensure the safe progress and completion of offshore plant construction in such a situation of internal and external danger so that they can promote their own financial stability according to unexpected accidents and effectively manage risks.
This study thus intends to review the liability relations in offshore plant construction insurance and propose a group of criteria to clarify who shall be held responsible among the participants of construction through examining and making interpretative analyses on the clause of liability term.