The company will do the front-end engineering and design study and provide engineering and management assistance for the development of the foundations for the 30MW project.
The contract has a value of around NOK 40 million (EUR 4.8 million), Aibel said. Work will start immediately at Aibel's offices in Haugesund and Oslo, in Norway, with 30 employees expected to be involved in the project.
The project is due to be completed in 2017. Statoil has previously carried out a demonstration project of the Hywind concept on a smaller scale off Karmoy, Norway.
This project is in a race to be the first floating project in the UK, with a rival 50MW proposal revealed in May, very close to Statoil's site off the coast of Aberdeenshire.
It will be made up of five 6MW turbines in water depths of up to 100 metres, around 25 kilometres from the coast.
