In focus: Enabling the future step by step

A clear warning about the energy transition was issued by Norway-based consultancy DNV this week. A massive global expansion of electrification is underway – but it won’t be enough to meet the Paris agreement because fossil fuels will still constitute 50 per cent of the global energy mix by 2050.

DNV presented this outcome in its Energy Transition Outlook 2021 on Wednesday.

Tackling global warming will be a process that involves forces that are beyond the power of the offshore energy industry. But action is the antidote to despair and when it comes to the energy transition we have already seen that the first-mover advantage is there. Renewable energy and sustainable solutions will be important in the future one way or the other. So let the industry do what it does best, come up with innovations that make an impact. As the French writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, once said, “As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it”.

In the light of that quote, Orient Cable (NBO) has completed works on the dynamic subsea cable at China’s Yangxi Shapa III offshore wind project that will connect a floating wind turbine to a fixed unit for the first time. Commissioning tests of what is said to be the world’s first anti-typhoon floating wind turbine were completed on 1 September, representing the end of offshore work and that the unit is ready to connect to the 400 MW project.

In other news from China, oil and gas company CNOOC has launched the country’s first offshore carbon capture and storage (CCS) project in the South China Sea. The plan is for the project to store more than 1.46 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. The CCS facilities will be located at the CNOOC’s Enping 15-1 oilfield in the Pearl River Mouth Basin. To be precise, the location is about 190 kilometres southeast of Hong Kong. The project is designed to reinject as much as 300,000 tonnes of CO2 per year into seabed reservoirs.

It is estimated that by 2070, Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage technology will account for 15 per cent of the total global carbon dioxide reduction, reaching about 10 billion tons per year. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop large liquefied carbon dioxide carriers to transport carbon dioxide to storage facilities.

Steps were taken by South Korean steel-making company POSCO and shipbuilding giant Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering Co. (KSOE) this week. They partnered up with others to develop a liquefied carbon dioxide (CO2) carrier. Under the deal, the partners aim to develop a large liquefied carbon dioxide carrier of over 20,000 cbm by 2025.

Another ‘world-first’ initiative came from an EU-wide partnership, it aims to deliver bankable hybrid marine energy parks. Major European companies and project developers have joined forces with leading research institutions to unlock large-scale potential of combined wind, wave and offshore floating solar renewable energy sources.

The project is called ‘European Scalable Offshore Renewable Energy Sources (EU-SCORES)’. Under the project lead of Dutch Marine Energy Centre (DMEC), the EU-SCORES consortium partners will work together to showcase the benefits of multi-source offshore parks across Europe by 2025, paving the way for similar bankable projects in the future.