Fifty shades of collaboration in time of energy transition

There is little doubt that the past few years have witnessed the rise of energy-related collaborations to an extent never seen before. This is because cross-industry collaborations seem to be crucial for companies to ride the energy transition train which is indeed moving very fast.

The current energy transition can be described as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform the global energy sector from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy in the coming decades. Although it is mainly driven by sustainability reasons, the energy transition will only be successful if it provides energy security and access, along with enabling economic growth and development. In other words, its success will depend on a mix of different solutions that extend well beyond a single industry and have a positive environmental impact.

In order to make the energy transition happen, changes need to be navigated at a scale that cannot be achieved by an individual player. Therefore, when it comes to the global energy transition, collaboration becomes a multistakeholder, multifaceted challenge.

At this year’s virtual edition of Offshore Energy Exhibition & Conference (OEEC), attendees had the opportunity to gain insights directly from stakeholders into various aspects of ongoing collaborations in the offshore and maritime industries. These collaborations are ranging from technological, IT, geographical and financial ones to public private partnerships, joint ventures, coalitions and collective impact initiatives.

With a common goal of advancing and achieving the global renewable energy transition, energy-related collaborative projects are based on innovation, re-innovation, cross-skilling, creativity, collaborative know-how and adaptability to constant change.

The North Sea region is probably one of the best and most viable examples when talking about collaborations aimed at advancing energy transition. It is considered as an energy hub of the future with a vast renewable energy potential.

The region has existing oil and gas infrastructure – whose golden days are believed to be over – that needs to be decommissioned or reused. At the same time, many renewable energy projects, most of them in the offshore wind sector, are progressing in the North Sea. O&G assets are coexisting with offshore wind farms, floating solar farms, aquaculture, fish farms and shipping lanes — all of these sectors have their unique role in the envisioned energy transition.

For this reason, industry players favor collaborations as they want to benefit from synergy effects – cost reduction, reduction of CO2 emissions and opportunities to enter new markets.

“The North Sea to me seems quite large, but if you look at all these plans that we have, it looks quite small and it would have been nice that it is twice the size,” Mark Paalvast, Co-Founder at MO4, an offshore energy consultancy, said during the energy talk ‘The key to a successful energy transition’.

In the North Sea, a large number of functions need to be assessed to make the best use of limited space. The states bordering the North Seas are establishing shared large-scale offshore electricity infrastructure in order to exploit their offshore wind energy resources. The Dutch part of the North Sea is certainly one of the most intensively used seas in the world. The 2016-2021 North Sea Policy Document sets out the desired policy for the future intensified use of this space, within the limits of the marine ecosystem.

The implementation of the plans targeting the North Sea requires alignment between national policies of the European states that use this marine ecosystem. National policies also have to be aligned with EU and international laws and standards.

Paalvast explained that old, empty O&G fields can be used for much-needed storage of CO2, which is a ‘big thing’ in the European Green Deal. According to last year’s study by Edinburg University, using existing platforms in the North Sea as carbon capture and storage (CCS) sites would be 10 times cheaper than decommissioning.

Paalvast also touched upon the possibility of using the unemployed oil platforms for the production of hydrogen.

In order to make these plans work, the entire offshore energy value chain and the industries need to work together to achieve a common goal.

“We need everyone here to make this happen, to bring down the levelized cost of electricity for this renewable source of energy; to make it competitive with the onshore energy,” Paalvast added.

“Thankfully, collaboration is not something new in our industry – I think in the O&G industry, it’s more a norm than an exception.”

He referred to big projects worth hundreds of millions and even billions of euros/dollars, such as FPSO, and FLNG units. There, the norm is always to work together, in joint ventures, to share the risk, share the uptime and tackle technical challenges.

Not only old platforms can find a different purpose at the end of their life cycle but also wind parks can be used as marine energy parks, Benjamin Lehner, Business & Innovation Advisor at DMEC said during the talk show ‘Focus on offshore wind’. He explained that decommissioned wind farms are the ‘perfect playground’ for testing marine energy devices because of their electrical infrastructure. Lehner pointed out that the big chance lies there as well – to look into technologies that are not there yet.

Wijnand van Aalst, CEO at Van Aalst who also participated in the above talk show, stressed the importance of collaboration in the renewable energy industry:

“It’s very important for all companies to contribute to the energy transition. We have an obligation towards ourselves, towards next generation to invest in new technologies and innovation.” 

Companies including start-ups, individual experts, all levels of governments, educational institutions and others are expected to increasingly forge North Sea-focussed collaborations in the future, finding new ways to use the common infrastructure, solving the spatial planning problem more efficiently, coordinating investments, and harmonising policies and standards.

As the marine and offshore collaboration often requires working in a very risky environment, companies are faced with many challenges. These include high operational costs, tech problems, safety risks, inefficient use of assets, severe weather conditions and many more.

In order to better understand and manage these risks, many companies have started using digital twins or virtual models that replicate products/vessels in the offshore and marine industries. The digital twin technology focuses on the use of big data for information management and predictive analytics, helping companies make smarter decisions.

“Digital twin is a model of the vessel, of all the complex things involved. They (digital twins) can assimilate the operation before it takes place,” Paalvast said when talking about the benefits of digital twins.

Digital twins can be used to identify weather windows so that vessels can operate in a safe way and be used up to their maximum because they are usually very expensive and have high daily rates.

For example, digital twins can be applied to operations involving the installation of delicate subsea power cables. Because cable-laying vessels are very sensitive to the waves, any movement can considerably damage power cables whose repair costs millions of euros. Here, digital twins are used to determine current operating conditions, e.g. wave height, to improve relevant decision-making processes. What is more, they serve for training purposes and ‘what if’ scenario analysis.

Applications of digital twins are also widely embraced in the offshore wind industry because they offer a myriad of benefits. Digital twin models enable technicians to diagnose the health of a turbine, improve planning and minimize too frequent journeys to turbines – with these innovative models and related forecasts, stakeholders are saving costs, lowering risks and improving efficiency.

When it comes to collaborations in this area, there are numerous ongoing projects. One of them is a joint industry project involving Acta Marine, MARIN, MO4, Next Ocean, Radac and SMST that runs until the end of 2022. The partners aim to develop, test and validate a planning system that makes use of a digital twin of the walk-to-work vessel Acta Auriga and the gangway of SMST. The digital twin model, developed by MO4 and MARIN, considers the hydrodynamic characteristics, the DP system and gangway and an anti-roll tank. This accurate model is coupled to a weather forecast and used to predict the operability. The model will be validated with detailed environmental and response data gathered on board by Next Ocean and Radac.

Interesting feature of digital twins is that they are constantly evolving and being refined. They can combine the as-designed twin with IoT and other data, as well as each company’s expertise. Apart from their modelling and simulation capability, digital twins can shorten project delivery times, improve information quality and achieve energy efficiency.

Due to the fact that each party involved in energy-related projects has specific interests, it can be said that everyone benefits from digital twin model one way or another.

Therefore, one cannot deny the fact that multistakeholder cooperation on digital twins boosts innovation, improves processes and speeds up the energy transition.

Each transition starts within the company. It requires primarily the internal collaboration before the external one takes place.

Leaders often have vision but not built-in architecture around that vision, Hannes Leroy, Associate Professor at RSM Erasmus University, remarked during the energy talk ‘Leadership in changing times’.

To drive change in their organization, leaders need to start working in a different way. They need to make sure that the vision is translated into daily operations, overcoming moral dilemmas of change while at the same time being task-, people- and talent-oriented.

In order to tackle industry-wide problems, different companies are seeing the necessity to gather around one table, offering their unique competencies.

The common goal of advancing energy transition offers the opportunity to many start-ups and large companies to work together. The potentials for collaboration between start-ups and corporations are huge. So are the challenges. The main challenge lies in the fact that they have different points of view – different foundations needed for innovation. For this reason, scale-ups and large companies need to find common ground while at the same time striving to achieve a common goal.

As explained by Tom Milder, Manager Engineering & Innovations at Jumbo Maritime, a heavy lift shipping and offshore company with a history of more than 50 years, one has to look for innovations outside and not only within the company. He said that Jumbo has its own innovations and technologies with 60-70 engineers working in this field but needs more innovations to keep up with the pace of development in the industry.

“You need an environment around you with all kind of companies that strive to develop new innovations. The more successful they are, the more successful we become.”

Milder said that larger companies, in order to develop, depend on new technologies and start-ups. Similarly, the markets in which these large companies operate develop much faster than before – such as the wind industry at the moment – and are demanding change from these companies.

Speaking about start-up vs. scale-up collaboration in the energy transition context, Milder said that a lot of smaller companies are specializing in innovative propulsion systems or energy systems but there are many different solutions being offered. Jumbo is working together with start-ups, scouting the market to find developments that are most suitable for the company’s way of working.

On the other hand, start-ups need to get in touch with larger companies and convince them to select their particular solution. They need to have enthusiasm that will allow them to gain trust of larger, established companies. On top of that, start-ups can collaborate with other start-ups that have compatible product, offering in this way integrated solutions to the market.

Inviting corporations to open up for working together with small companies to enable the energy transition, Paalvast pointed out that innovation is a two-way street:

“Let’s collaborate and see as an industry if we can make this successful because you cannot expect a company to innovate for you, you have to do it together.”