Guest Column: Delivering to our Walk to Work promises

In this Guest Column, Stephen Bolton, Managing Director of Bibby Marine Services, shares his views with our readers.

As an industry driving improved efficiency and effectiveness, it is my firm belief that we as service providers have a responsibility to provide information not only on what the equipment does but in addition on how the service will perform for the individual client.

Expanding further; Taking the gangway height this is rather simplistic, in that by providing basic information on the target platform height above LAT and with some basic calculations around the gangway height range and tidal range over the time period when we will be working we can make useful calculations on whether we have restrictions at say a high spring tide on a particular day. Discussing likely access success or capability over a time period at a location is altogether more difficult.

Hence Bibby working with Damen designed the Digital Twin simulator to initially support the Damen ASV9020 platform which forms the basis of the Bibby WaveMaster 1 (operating speculatively in the central North Sea) and her sister ship the Bibby WaveMaster Horizon (dedicated to SGRE and ENBW on the German EEZ HoHe See Offshore Wind Farm).  

The Digital Twin brings together the vessel dynamic model with the actual DP and gangway controller. By adding the client supplied met / metocean data for their site, we can analyse the performance that can be expected based on the time of year. In simplistic terms this allows us to state the predicted access likely to be achieved over the charter period and allow a discussion around the execution of the works to take place with greater certainty. It also facilitates discussions around the impact of addition access points and how that could increase accessibility. In summary driving the efficiency of operational planning we seek.

Well recently we at Bibby thought the answer was no. Despite being able to model and predict access we felt we needed to publicly validate the results from the BWM1 and BWMH. That’s why recently we commissioned BMO Offshore to review the data from the 2 years of almost continuous operations of the BWM1 and the recent 1^st few months of the BWMH.

In summary the analysis concluded with great certainty that for individual locations, the Digital Twin data matched the extrapolated data from our experience to date on BWM1 with the rather limited data we have for BWMH (only operating for a few months). A great success and information that will now be available to our clients as well as the predicted information from the simulator to add to confidence levels.

However note the use of the word “extrapolated” what we found was that over the 27months of operating BWM1, we are rarely allowed to access above 2.5mHs, yet we can show that our safe limit as defined by the simulator and taking account of the location and likely weather is typically in excess of 3.0mHs.

So my challenge to the sector is as follows, if we are bringing R&D focused designs to the market, supported by Digital Twins and validated by real life data; should we not work to these new limits? Is this not the next stage of being efficient and effective within the bounds of QHSE?