Cerulean Winds to produce wind energy for net zero oil and gas production

Cerulean and partner Frontier Power International want to deploy floating offshore wind farms in the North Sea to produce multiple GW of electricity. The scale and location close together in the Central North Sea will enable a new basin-wide offshore transmission system to be constructed which oil and gas platforms can access, allowing them to remove millions of tonnes of production emissions by trading gas and diesel generation for a flexible, cost effective and cleaner alternative, the company said.

Cerulean is part of a larger consortium including NOV, Siemens Gamesa, Siemens Energy, DEME and Worley which wants to develop three 333km2 sites of hundreds of floating turbines, after being offered the lion’s share of seabed leases in the recent Crown Estate Scotland INTOG round. The conpanies will deliver one of the UK’s largest infrastructure investment projects (c£20 billion) and support the sector’s decarbonisation targets.

Dan Jackson, founding director of Cerulean Winds said: “The oil and gas sector is wrestling with the challenges of meeting the North Sea Transition Deal emissions reduction targets whilst supporting UK energy security. We recognise that to achieve meaningful reductions at the pace required, a reliable basin-wide approach is needed that they can plug into when they are ready to for affordable power."

Each wind farm site is located within 100km of the others and will be connected together to form the offshore ring main around the Central North Sea. A High Voltage Alternating Current (HVAC) transmission will provide availability and redundancy for maximising generation uptime. Humza Malik, founding partner of Frontier Power, explains: “ The scale allows for offtake to other parts of the North Sea through a new High Voltage Direct Current (HDVC) network. For the oil and gas companies, this diversity of offtake provides robustness to the scheme and added flexibility.”