Rovco wins survey contract with Flotation Energy for Cenos floating offshore wind farm

Located in the Central North Sea, the 1.4GW Cenos floating wind development will cover approximately 333km2. Rovco, having recently launched a dedicated marine site characterisation business line, will deploy its multi-purpose, custom-reconfigured DP2 survey vessel, the Glomar Supporter, to carry out the work.

It is expected that the project will comprise subsea studies of the floating wind turbine generators, mooring line anchor locations, inter-array cables, fixed foundation substation areas, and the portion of export cables that fall within these locations.

Rovco’s scope of work involves the acquisition of geophysical and benthic information to provide detailed data to inform environmental impact assessment (EIA) consents and the engineering processes from engineering to early front-end engineering and design (FEED) study.

The geophysical element of the workscope requires the acquisition of multi-beam echo sounder, side scan sonar, magnetometer, sub-bottom profiler, and multi-channel seismic data along with associated analysis, processing, interpretation, and reporting.

Flotation Energy’s partner on Cenos is Norwegian-offshore wind company, Vårgrønn; a joint venture between energy company Plenitude (Eni) and investor HitecVision. The joint venture secured a lease earlier this year as part of Crown Estate Scotland’s INTOG (Innovation and Targeted Oil & Gas) round.

Craig Davis, Director of Site Characterisation for Rovco, said: “We’re extremely pleased to be working with Edinburgh-based Flotation Energy on this project. The company has been a significant contributor towards the building of a strong offshore wind industry in the UK and beyond.

“Our dedicated site characterisation division was launched specifically to provide the full range of survey solutions to offshore wind projects such as Cenos, in order to take it from pre-construction to first energy as swiftly, efficiently, and cost effectively as possible. Having access to the full range of tools, equipment, and technology on the Glomar Supporter, along with our highly experienced and specialist team, will be instrumental in helping Flotation Energy meet its timescale for this project utilising a local supply chain partner.”

Dan Wright, Supply Chain Manager at Flotation Energy, commented: “Having secured Rovco’s extensive offshore renewables experience to support the subsea studies will add immense value to our Cenos project and also reaffirms our commitment to building a robust local supply chain for our offshore wind projects. By focusing our efforts on creating flexible and collaborative partnerships with Scottish-based companies such as Rovco, we can provide opportunities to establish a floating wind supply chain ready to deliver for Scotwind licensing projects and beyond.”

“The successful delivery of our survey campaign with Rovco enables us to maintain our fast-track delivery schedule for Cenos, a project that will decarbonise North Sea oil and gas assets and remove over 2 million tonnes of CO2 a year, helping to support Scotland towards its 2045 Net Zero targets.”

Launched at the turn of the year, Rovco’s marine site characterisation business unit was established to help address a critical industry shortage of companies with the all-round capabilities and expertise to support a rapidly emerging market during the earliest phases of offshore wind farm development.

At its heart is the multi-purpose DP2 survey vessel, Glomar Supporter. On long-term charter from Glomar, the vessel underwent an extensive rebuild and refurbishment in 2021 and has been reconfigured to permanently carry an entire suite of state-of-the-art survey sensors and equipment, aimed at providing the highest quality data capture, reporting and technology-enabled solutions for a streamlined and efficient site characterisation offering. This package offers complete flexibility while on site, to adapt and respond to different challenges in a single offshore trip.