Offshore Wind Could Power Oil Platforms and Solidify Industries

Offshore wind farms could eventually provide electricity for offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, according to new research.

The research, presented May 7 at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, shows how the offshore oil and wind industries could continue their close relationship in the long run. Today, the emerging offshore wind industry relies on the offshore oil industry’s expertise in ocean energy development.

Wind-powered oil platforms could reduce air pollution and prevent the platforms from requiring natural gas generators for their electricity, cutting fuel costs, said Francisco Haces-Fernandez, a researcher at Texas A&M University-Kingsville.

Excess wind power generated at offshore wind farms powering oil platforms could be sold onto the onshore power grid, helping to reduce costs further, said Haces-Fernandez, whose 2018 study suggested that both wind and wave energy could be used to generate electricity for offshore oil development.

No offshore wind farms exist in the Gulf of Mexico, and their use there would be seasonal, depending on wind conditions that vary widely month by month, he said.

Few Companies Interested

Few U.S. oil companies have so far expressed interest in tying wind power to oil platforms, but Norwegian offshore wind and oil developer Equinor is doing so in European waters, Haces-Fernandez said.

Using offshore wind to electrify oil platforms in the U.S. is dependent on the development of floating wind turbines, Liz Burdock, CEO of the Business Network for Offshore Wind, said in an email.

Equinor, formerly Statoil, operates the world’s only commercial floating offshore wind farm in Scotland. The company also owns offshore wind leases on the East Coast in the U.S. and has expressed interest in developing floating wind farms off the coast of California.

Powering oil platforms with wind energy represents an area where offshore wind and oil and gas “can overlap to provide economic benefits to the O&G supply chain,” Burdock said, referring to oil and gas.

Wind and Oil Closely Tied

Ongoing ties between the offshore wind and oil industries were on display at the Offshore Technology Conference, which is primarily an oil industry-focused event.

Offshore wind, an entirely new industry in the U.S., relies on U.S. oil industry support vessels and companies to build and install offshore wind turbine foundations. Workers and companies from the offshore oil industry are the ones who primarily have the skills needed to build offshore wind turbines, Doreen Harris, director of large-scale renewables at the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, said at the conference.

For example, Deepwater Wind, which completed North America’s first—and so far only—offshore wind farm near Block Island, R.I., in 2016, relied on a Louisiana oil industry company to fabricate and install the wind farm’s turbine foundations, said Paul Murphy, U.S. head of engineering for Orsted AS, a Danish offshore wind developer. Orsted acquired Deepwater Wind in 2018.

“For our [offshore wind] project in the Northeast, we are in direct conversation with a lot of suppliers from our oil and gas businesses as well,” Christer Af Geijerstam, president of Equinor Wind US LLC, said at the conference.

Offshore wind is among the largest untapped renewable energy sources in the U.S. So far, the the federal government has issued 15 offshore wind development leases in waters from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

If fully developed, those leases would support 19 gigawatts of electricity generating capacity—enough to provide power for 19 million homes, Walter Cruickshank, acting director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said at the conference.