Douglas-Westwood managing director, John Westwood, said most of the growth would be outside the North Sea, where the reserve sizes of new fields are now very small.
"The oil majors have already voted with their dollars and shifted their attention to the deepwater areas of Brazil, West Africa and the Gulf of Mexico," Mr Westwood said.
Infield Systems managing director, Quentin Whitfield, said at the moment there were a total of 2,384 fields around the world under consideration for future development, which would involve 1,587 fixed platforms, 232 floating production systems, 138,000 km of pipelines and 30,000 km of umbilical cables.
Douglas-Westwood principal offshore analyst, Dominic Harbinson, said he expected continuing growth in capital expenditure in four key areas; offshore pipelines, subsea production, floating production and deepwater activity.
As for the long-term, Mr Westwood said depleting onshore and shallow-water reserves means more oil must come from deep water. He also voiced concern about global depletion rates. "The result will be major oil price increases, which bodes well for the offshore industry but has serious implications for the world economy," he said.
Mr Westwood said the prospects for floating liquefied natural gas and floating Gas-to-Liquid plants were also good because of the drive to fully utilise offshore gas reserves that have little in the way of pipeline infrastructure or are far from viable markets.
"Overall, the long-term prospects for the offshore industry are good. However the present way of working is far from satisfactory," Mr Westwood said. "To maximise benefits for all, governments, operators and suppliers need to find better ways of working together."
However, Mr Westwood revealed that the real long-term play is offshore renewable energy, which he said was in its very early stages of development. His firm's research indicates that in excess of $4.3 billion will be spent on offshore renewable energy installations this decade but this figure has the potential to be greater if more of the very large number of proposals are realised.
