For more than 30 years manned operating oil and gas facilities have been processing high temperature, high pressure, explosive and corrosive products. The facilities themselves often moored in water depths exceeding several kilometres in some of the harshest weather areas in the world. Couple this with the drilling requirements often extending four km or more from the seafloor, the requirement to ship or pipe the product to market, and the lower energy efficiency of the product (compared to electricity) it’s impressive that the business case still manages a typical rate of return (ROR) of more than 15%.

Meanwhile, floating wind turbines that are unmanned, do not process any such potentially explosive products and generate ready to use electricity can only dream of such rates of return.

Why? It’s an interesting question.

I spent four decades in oil and gas and witnessed the evolution of the industry as we went from 100 meters of water depth to kilometers, the development of directional drilling, and well head pressures increasing from 5,000 psi to 20,000 psi; and, all of this was undertaken with projects that typically had a lead time of five years with oil prices that fluctuated from as low as $10/bbl (in 1986 and 1988-89) to as high as $147 in 2008.

Even though each and every oil and gas project seemed to end up with a custom design, the industry did readily embrace standardisation be it with codes and standards, or such practical issues as remote operated vehicle interfaces, or the willingness to share technological advances through the use of joint industry projects. This collaboration yielded huge benefits for the industry.

There’s a lot of advantages for floating offshore wind:

1. Areas can be selected to get the most wind.
2. Locations can be positioned off any bird migratory paths.
3. Turbines can be positioned out of sight (over the horizon).
4. The skills sets for design, manufacturing, installation, operating and maintenance can be readily transferred from the oil and gas sector.
5. Governments are prepared to pay a premium for the electricity – in the UK the latest round of bidding secured a price of £216 per MWh, significantly in excess of fixed wind.

The current business case for floating wind is driven primarily by CAPEX, to a lesser degree by OPEX, and finally availability (as the agreed price for electricity supply is typically secured for a fixed period).

The key difference between a floating wind farm and an oil and gas development is the scale and uniformity, a 1GW wind farm may have 50 or more floating structures, turbines, and dynamic electrical cables, and several hundred mooring lines and anchors all of a similar type. This is very different from an oil and gas floating production facility and should provide opportunities to:

1. a) reduce CAPEX through the application of standardisation and a reduction in conservative assumptions underpinned by research.

and,

1. b) a reduction in OPEX and “lost” availability through the use of predictive maintenance underpinned by monitoring and standardisation.

The wet components of a floating wind farm, namely the hull, moorings, anchors and dynamic electrical cables typically account for 35-45% of the installed CAPEX, 25-35% of annual OPEX and a make a similar contribution to modelled loss of availability.

So, how is the floating wind industry making progress on these issues?

For standardisation, we will take hulls as an example: there are currently dozens of designs and many developers are repeatedly solving essentially the same underlying engineering problems independently using offshore demonstrators.  Semi-subs, spars, TLPs and barge-type concepts differ fundamentally, but they all need answers to questions around global loads, fatigue, stability, turbine–platform interaction, mooring loads, dynamic cables, corrosion, inspection, tow-out, installation and operating and maintenance (O&M). At present, substantial amounts of model testing, numerical validation, instrumentation and operational learning remain proprietary to individual projects or technology developers.

When considering the maturity and experience of the oil and gas industry in floating structures this situation seems at best to be a rather inefficient approach.

The design houses and large contractors serving the oil and gas sectors now explicitly sell standardised/scalable design families of semi submersibles. Could the same approach not be used for floating wind?

For moorings and anchors there is a lack of collaboration that would enable a reduction in CAPEX through a better understanding of the mechanics of synthetic mooring lines or a reduction in OPEX or “lost availability” through the use of monitoring to enable predictive maintenance or targeted inspections to be undertaken prior to a failure. Once again, this is in stark contrast to the oil and gas industry that shares data through such platforms as OREDA and a very strong tradition of Joint Industry Projects (JIPs) in which competitors collectively fund work on problems that everyone shares but which doesn’t necessarily provide competitive advantage individually. Whilst floating wind does have some specific examples of collaboration there exists a difference in depth of collaboration and willingness to share operational learning.

The oil & gas industry learned to distinguish between things that they competed on such as reservoir access, acreage, commercial terms, project execution, and production performance and things that made little sense to compete on such as well-control safety, structural integrity, mooring failure mechanisms, materials qualification, subsea reliability, inspection techniques, design methodology and standards.

Floating wind developers aren’t going to win a seabed lease because: “Our polyester rope fatigue model is better than yours.”

If the culture does not change then floating wind will create an environment rather similar to the early offshore oil-and-gas industry: every project risks becoming a bespoke engineering exercise, and:

1. Business case hurdles will remain high with low rates of return.
2. The lead time for projects will remain long when compared to oil and gas.

In summary, floating wind may currently have too much innovation in hardware and not enough collaboration in evidence.