Over in Singapore’s Tuas industrial district, workers are assembling a giant floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) unit, part of the infrastructure that separates crude oil from what’s pulled up from offshore reservoirs. Next to it is a giant Goliath crane, which can lift up to 30,000 tons in a single heave; a gleaming white Royal Caribbean cruise ship sits just a few docks away.
Chris Ong, Seatrium’s CEO, sees the Iran conflict sharpening what specialists call the energy trilemma, or the trade-off between energy security, affordable supply, and environmental sustainability. “The situation is now even worse because of the destruction of supply, which is still not fully priced in,” Ong says. “People don’t understand; they have been swung between different stories every day.”
Yet if oil prices stay elevated, Ong thinks that will unlock new offshore projects around the world. “I think a lot of projects would come online if the price per barrel were around $100.”
Seatrium itself is barely three years old, though its DNA stretches back to Singapore’s colonial-era naval docks, later converted by the newly independent government into commercial shipyards. The company itself was formed in 2023 when Sembcorp Marine absorbed its rival, Keppel Offshore and Marine. Sembcorp Marine was contending with COVID-era disruptions and a legal hangover from corruption investigations in Brazil; Keppel, meanwhile, had decided to reinvent itself as an asset manager and was eager to shed its manufacturing business.
As Ong explains it, Singapore couldn’t sustain two shipyards competing for the same scarce land, talent, and capital. “We were competing against each other when there’s bigger competition in China and Korea,” he says. The fight over talent had grown particularly fierce: “We were competing with data centers, other builders, even our own customers.”
A former junior engineer, Ong spent nearly three decades in the industry, rising through both predecessors before taking over the merged group. Ong knew both companies, and so knew how to stitch the two together. “You are no longer red or green,” he recalled telling staff, referring to Keppel’s and Sembcorp’s corporate colors. “You are now electric blue.”
Ong credits a supply chain overhaul he branded “One Seatrium” for the turnaround. Seatrium now operates like a global manufacturer: components are built wherever it makes most sense and then brought together for final integration, usually in Singapore. “That allows us to scale the order book.” Ong explains.
Still, Seatrium has had a “love-hate relationship” with Brazil, in Ong’s words. Both of Seatrium’s predecessor companies were ensnared in Operation Car Wash, Brazil’s sweeping anti-corruption investigation that eventually consumed much of the country’s political and business establishment. In July 2025, Seatrium agreed to pay approximately $190 million in fines to Brazilian and Singaporean authorities to settle the case, finally closing the matter.
Ong says the experience drove the company to build “one of the most structured compliance programs” in the industry. “The question was, after Operation Car Wash, do we continue our presence in Brazil? First our compliance culture had to be right, then we had to determine whether this was the right geography to focus on our value-add to the energy landscape. And the answer was yes.”
“It all started when we realized that Guyana is also a former British colony,” Ong says. “Guyana and Singapore felt almost like siblings.”
While fossil fuels drive the bulk of Seatrium’s revenue, the company is also positioning itself as a builder of offshore wind infrastructure, including installation vessels, floating turbine carriers, and the high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) substations that transmit power back to shore.
Ong sees wind as a natural extension of the company’s engineering DNA. “You have your installation jack-ups, your foundations get bigger, and the whole infrastructure gets more complex. That complexity in engineering, proprietary technology, and execution excellence all fall in line with what we do in offshore oil and gas,” he says.
Seatrium has been involved in offshore wind since 2012, when it built its first wind turbine installation vessel. Today, it says it has contributed to projects representing nearly 16 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity worldwide.
“We originally thought the U.S. would be the next major destination that will grow,” Ong says. “But it’s still very nascent, very state-driven rather than federal-driven.”
Shipbuilding has become one of the most securitized industries in the world over the past two years, particularly as the U.S. chafes under China’s dominance of commercial shipbuilding.
Seatrium doesn’t make container ships, and so avoids the most prominent debates over shipbuilding. But Ong knows the company can’t avoid security questions—in part because the company’s clients include the Singaporean, U.S. and U.K. navies.
“If a project is sensitive to being built in China, we simply don’t build it there,” he says. “We have the flexibility to choose. Our Seatrium ‘arsenal of capacity’ gives us a very unique proposition.”
That positioning extends to Seatrium’s longest-range bets: floating nuclear power plants and floating data centers. Onshore projects can get snarled in land permitting issues, political blowback, and policy volatility; offshore projects, in contrast, can just get moved somewhere else.
“Building offshore energy infrastructure can actually be faster than building on land,” Ong says.
