Offshore Marine Management is deftly responding to gaps in the market provided by the expansion of the renewable energy sector and the investment being poured into it, moving from human capital to project management to business critical support partner with proven offshore experience.
According to a report just published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) renewable sources could be contributing 80 per cent of global energy needs by 2050. Specifically, it shows that installed wind power capacity at the end of 2010 produced around 2.5 per cent of global electricity demand, a share that it expects to increase tenfold to reach 25 per cent in 2050.
The wind farms that are being constructed off the coasts of the UK, Scandinavia and Germany rely on cables to bring the power to the land-based grid, and with ‘supply risk’ at the forefront of governments’ minds, neighbouring countries are busily connecting with one another to even out supply. Undersea cables are still vulnerable once laid, as some operators have learnt to their cost.
In April, when the NorNed Norway to Holland interconnector broke 300 metres from the Dutch coast, it was estimated that repairs would take 10 weeks. The reason for the failure is as yet unknown but the loss of revenue to the Dutch and Norwegian electricity utility companies will be considerable; similarly, any failure in wind farm cables would have serious financial repercussions under a similar OFTO/National Grid structure.
Bristol-based Offshore Marine Management (OMM), which started life eight years ago as an agency providing manpower to the offshore cable industry now has offices in Cambridge, Bremen, Panama, Singapore and Abu Dhabi. It is rapidly expanding to being a full service provider, giving operators the assurance that repair jobs would be dealt with a lot more expeditiously than in the current standard industry practice, where work does not commence until a procurement process is fulfilled after the failures take place. “Operators can only avoid loss if they have an emergency response plan in hand where you update your vessel and equipment availability on a weekly basis so you can react quicker than 10 weeks!” says OMM’s operations director Eckhard Bruckschen.
The growth of OMM has been rapid. Its recruitment arm, founded in 2003, established itself over five years and now holds a database of experienced qualified officers and crew members, who can be employed in all areas of marine and vessel operations. OMM understands the skills gap within the supply of qualified, experienced offshore people to the offshore industry and addressed this in 2010 by starting the Offshore Marine Academy (OMA). The OMA offers two functions: firstly, a 12-month work training scheme for young adults to enter the offshore industry in a safe and practical way; and secondly, providing offshore induction courses and training to professionals entering the offshore industry who have cross-sellable skills. OMM’s managing director Rob Grimmond stated that: “This is a key initiative by OMM to address some of the concerns as the industry shows strong growth and expansion and OMA gives the industry more qualified, professionally trained people.”
It was not until 2006 that the company diversified into service and marine project support. In 2009 it had a turnover of around £11 million; in 2010 that figure doubled, and this year Bruckschen expects it to reach £40 million.
Undersea cables are strategically important but subject to a great deal of stress, whether from scour and subsidence or accidents like being fouled by anchors or even dredging. How they are buried and covered is critical and OMM has quickly built up its expertise in this niche. The list of projects it has supported since 2003 covers major cable laying operations for the biggest players in northern Europe such as BP, E.ON, Vestas, Norsk Hydro, Npower and, between 2005 and 2007, the longest subsea power cable in the world, NorNed.
Implementing these projects effectively is a combination of getting the right team and the right equipment together, says Bruckschen. “That is what we do—we provide marine solutions which fit best the project. So if burial is required we don’t rely on equipment that we happen to have in our shed—we go out to subcontractors who have the expertise in that field and determine which tool is right for this particular offshore project that has specific burial requirements.”
Last year, OMM landed contracts for survey inspection burial and repair works at two of the UK’s first shallow water offshore wind farms, BOWind’s Barrow array and Burbo Bank wind farm, covering 10 square kilometres off the Wirral coast. Among other high tech equipment belonging to Vroon Offshore and Williams Shipping Marine, OMM brought in a jumbo ‘multicat’ fromMaritime Craft Services using a seabed crawler system fitted with a suite of subsea equipment and sensors.
Grimmond commented at the time that the contracts confirmed BOWind and Dong’sconfidence in OMM's shallow water subsea cable and survey solutions for the renewable sector. “It provides us with a further platform to progress our hi-tech and quality services to an expanding client base,” he said—and the company quickly pressed home its advantage. “The service we provided at Burbo Bank and Barrow had a knock-on effect and we felt able to offer installation projects,” explains Bruckschen. “We secured an installation project in Germany. It was a key project that linked the HVDC grid connection platform to the BARD offshore windfarm platform for TenneT Offshore, involving three kilometres of some of the biggest and heaviest power cable in the industry; but it involved mobilization of a vessel with tools and assets from another company that were brought to the project under OMM for their expertise.”
This job was completed between August and November 2010 from the MV Seabed Worker, a state-of-the-art, multipurpose DP2 vessel with OMM survey, cable and pull-in teams and sub-contracted WROVs (work-class remotely operated vehicles). Hallin Marine, Modus and Aquatic were chosen as OMM's partners: “We contracted Modus to bury the cable after we had installed it,” he says. “That was done off a normal offshore construction vessel mobilized with aquatic reel and installed and buried by a Modus trencher.”
Soon OMM’s flexibility and track record brought it into a bigger league with a contract to install and bury a large number of inter-array cables, which will link the 140 Siemens turbines destined to make up the 500 megawatt Greater Gabbard project off the coast of eastern England. This work was to have been carried out by Subocean, which collapsed last year, so the EPC contractor Fluor was obliged to find a replacement in short order. “The contract was signed in March with a commencement date in April this year so we didn’t have a lot of time to put a lot of procedures in place and secure equipment—and that is the strength and flexibility of OMM,” Bruckschen says.
By the end of March, OMM had engaged the multi-role subsea support vessel Deep Cygnus on trenching trials. “Those are now complete. We have mobilised the ship for the cable laying and have already installed cables, with burial operations of these cables about to commence.” Once installed, the cables have to be buried, something of a problem in Greater Gabbard’s hard London clay, he says. On the burial solution the company is again working with Modus which has come up with a modified jetting tool, he adds.
This award was a giant step even for fast-track OMM. In the long term it wants to entrench itself as the industry’s installation and inspection maintenance and emergency response provider: the partner that keeps the power flowing. “We plan to have survey vessels on call, maintenance programmes running and emergency response plans in place for our clients in the renewable generation, telecommunications and power supply sectors,” says Bruckschen.
With Greater Gabbard currently the largest wind farm being constructed in the world and Burbo Bank due to be quadrupled in size, it will face no lack of opportunity for development into this fast growing international market.
