Green-energy infrastructure developer Cerulean Winds will bid for four seabed lease sites to decarbonize the U.K.’s oil and gas sector as this scale will remove more emissions quickly, keep costs lower for platform operators, and provide the anchor for large scale North-South offshore transmission.
The floating offshore wind and green energy proposal for Crown Estate Scotland’s Innovation and Targeted Oil and Gas leasing round (INTOG) includes four 1.5 GW sites of floating wind power.
With more than £6 billion of investment proposed for each 100-turbine site, the scheme would abate tens of millions of tons of CO2 in line with North Sea Transition Deal targets.
Cerulean Winds, with its selected delivery partner NOV, has been engaging the supply chain for more than 18 months and has a live request for information (RFI) with U.K. yards for the fabrication and assembly of its tri-floater technology.
The development would create more than 10,000 jobs, many of which would be high value manufacturing jobs in Scotland.
“We have a big, bold bid, which is ready to go on scaling the green economy, creating thousands of jobs and making Scotland’s oil and gas production the cleanest in the world,” said Dan Jackson, Cerulean Winds founding director. “We are absolutely committed to the local supply chain benefiting from this development and far surpassing local content targets. Our base structure design can be floated in very shallow water depths suitable for the U.K., unlike alternative cement floating wind structures which require 90 meters so can’t be built here.”
“There is a lot of concern about rising energy prices and energy security,” he said. “Wind and green energy at this scale are a big part of the solution. We are engaging with oil and gas operators and can see the appetite is there to get behind cleaning up production, and we can deliver in a way that minimizes disruption. Whilst smaller piece-meal wind developments are useful for testing concepts or innovations, it will take a U.K.-wide solution to remove the emissions at the pace required to hit the net-zero targets governments. Furthermore, our large-scale scheme lowers the LCOE — cost of the power — which is highly attractive to the operators.”
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