Tata Steel predicts booming demand for offshore jacket foundations

Mr Richard Freeman, Tata Steel's manager for product and market development, said that over the next decade, the need for steel within jacket foundations for offshore wind farms will come to dwarf anything ever seen in oil and gas.

He added that "Historically, an oil and gas jacket would have been 7,000 tonnes and it would have taken a year to build. By comparison, offshore wind jackets are about 1,000 tonnes, and these guys [potential customers] want to build two of them a week."

Expected to dominate future projects
Jackets represent only a tiny fraction of the foundations in use at operational offshore wind farms. However, they are expected to dominate future projects, as developers move into deeper waters and use heavier turbines. Vattenfall's recently commissioned Ormonde is the first big project to use them for all its turbines, and it will be closely followed by Belgium’s Thornton Bank 2.

In anticipation of surging demand, Singaporean shipyard Keppel this month purchased a minority stake in Norway's Owec Tower, the offshore wind sector's leading designer of jackets.

Aims to make highly refined components
Rather than simply pumping out vast quantities of cheap steel for the offshore wind sector, something sure to come from a number of Asian producers, Tata aims to make highly refined components, such as the bracing pieces that support the legs that can be rapidly assembled into jackets by fabrication yards.

Established players
In addition to established players, such as Scotland's BiFab (which assembled the jackets for Ormonde), the Netherlands' Smulders (working on Thornton Bank 2) and Denmark's Bladt Industries, a number of other fabrication yards are vying to pin down a share of the offshore wind market from Spain's Endesa to Northern Ireland's Harland and Wolff.

Although acknowledging that Tata could manufacture jackets of its own, Mr Freeman says it has made the strategic decision not to expand further down the supply chain.

Supply them all
He added that "To meet the demands for offshore wind farms stemming from the various European targets, there are going to be enough work to support at least five or six big fabricators making two jackets a week. If we make jackets, we become a competitor to our customers. What we'd rather do is supply them all."

Formerly known as Corus, the company was bought by the Tata Group in 2007 and is now the world's fifth largest producer of steel.