Developing direction
Mike Farish meets the director of one company that’s swiftly moving into the offshore market
If the UK is to meet the target for renewable energy generation implicit in the Round 3 offshore wind power programme then around 12million tonnes of steel foundation structures will need to be installed in the waters involved by the year 2020. At the moment, though, there is a need for production facilities in the UK that are capable of manufacturing the thick-walled, large diameter steel tubing from which appropriate structures can be fabricated. But by the middle of this year that situation will have changed thanks to a brand new production facility representing some £20million of investment currently under construction at Billingham on Teesside.
Both the estimate and the promise are made by Alex Dawson, Chief Executive of TAG Energy Solutions - an operation set up barely half a dozen years ago with the initial aim of utilising the base of marine fabrication skills in the area to service the oil and gas extraction operations taking place in the immediately adjacent North Sea. That business has already seen the establishment of a facility employing around 50 people at Billingham including a 5,915m2 workshop and quayside heavy lifting capacity of some 6,000 tonnes. But it is also one, as Dawson confirms, that has failed to satisfy the company’s ambitions for growth, so much so that around 18 months ago he decided that the business should switch priorities and aim instead to turn itself into a supplier for the burgeoning offshore wind sector.
Dawson’s reasons for doing so are implicit in his assessment of the market situation - one of potentially massive demand over the next couple of decades. But he also feels he has other grounds for believing that TAG has some distinct advantages on which it can develop its new business direction.
Perhaps the most important of those is the location of its existing operation on a Teesside waterfront. As Dawson explains, this has several immediate and positive implications for the company’s prospects. The first is its proximity to the major prospective wind farm development sites in the North Sea envisaged under Round 3 compared with existing suppliers based in Scandinavia and Germany. This means, he says, not just that transportation costs should be cheaper, but that the risks involved in shipping large steel structures over the sometimes extremely rough waters concerned should also be mitigated. Another is the more generalised advantage of the company’s location on Teesside - an area with an appropriate base of metal working skills due to its
existing associations with shipbuilding and the offshore oil and gas sector.
Moreover, that last factor is evident even within the company itself. Dawson says that there is the potential for significant transfer of competences and knowledge from the current operation targeting the oil and gas sector to the new focus on offshore wind. “It is very analogous,” he states.
The transfer, though, will be of generalised know-how rather than specific skills. That is because though the new facility will carry out similar processes to the existing one - cutting, bending and welding metal - they will be highly automated and not largely manual as at present. As Dawson points out the combination of physical scale and - if expectations are fulfilled - production volumes will make the use of automated production a necessity.
The output of the new facility will be “large diameter tubulars” - steel tubes up to 7.5m in diameter and as much as 60m in length with wall thicknesses of 120mm. They will be used in turn to fabricate monopile or jacket foundations and transition pieces for offshore wind turbines. Dawson says that once the new facility is up and running at full capacity then the theoretical maximum output will be around 100,000 tonnes of steel every year. He says that will be the equivalent of roughly 100-125 sets of monopiles and transition pieces or alternatively 50 jackets.
By the early part of this year work was underway to construct a new assembly facility that will provide 6,920ft2 of floorspace to house all the new production equipment and to recruit the first of as many as 400 new employees to work at the site. Initial recruitment efforts, Dawson indicates, will focus on supervisory and middle management personnel, while existing shopfloor workers will undergo retraining to enable them to become machine operators.
In parallel, the question of actually finding work for the facility is also coming into focus. Dawson indicates that in the first instance he is targeting EDF’s proposed Teesside project which could comprise as many as 30 turbines. The work involved could, he says, support the recruitment of as many as 80 new employees. The site is a Round 1 project that gained consent in 2007 and Dawson concedes that gaining such work is vital to ensuring that the new facility will have not just the equipment but also the experience necessary to bid for Round 3 projects when they start going out to tender in two or three years time. “We need to be ready for that,” he says. “So we don’t want to be idle in the meantime.”
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