Offshore wind power - new driving force for oil and gas industry

Recognising urgent requirements to combat negative impacts of climate change, the world is shifting to developing renewables to gradually replace fossil energy sources.

As a result, offshore wind power has emerged as one of the fields with the greatest development potential. Vietnam, with its high economic openness and global integration, has set goals and developed plans to develop its offshore wind power industry.

Accordingly, by 2030, Vietnam expects to have offshore wind power capacity of about 6,000 MW or event higher if there are better technologies, reasonable electricity prices and transmission costs.In order to develop offshore wind power on a large scale, multinational oil and gas corporations play a very important role.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the oil and gas industry, with its experience in implementing offshore projects, will contribute to sharing supply chains and technologies. The participation of oil and gas corporations will play an important role in making offshore wind a major industry soon.

Dr. Nguyen Quoc Thap, Chairman of the Vietnam Petroleum Association, said that experience in exploration, exploitation, design, construction and manufacture of works at sea, offshore services, facilities, human resources, information and understanding of meteorology, hydrology, geology, and marine chemistry are favourable conditions for oil and gas enterprises to participate in the offshore wind power sector, helping to optimise investment, avoiding waste of national resources, increasing efficiency, and reducing production costs.

Dr. Ngo Duc Lam, former Deputy Director of the Institute of Energy under the Ministry of Industry and Trade, said that currently, the Vietnam Oil and Gas Group (Petrovietnam) and Vietnam Electricity (EVN) are capable of piloting the development of offshore wind power projects.

Petrovietnam is a state-owned enterprise with great potential, prestige, and experience in the energy sector, especially offshore oil and gas, he said, adding that it has technologies and ability to arrange capital more conveniently than other businesses.

Since 2019, Petrovietnam’s units such as Russia - Vietnam oil and gas exploration joint venture Vietsovpetro, and Petrovietnam Technical Services Corporation (PTSC) have signed memoranda of understanding, confidentiality agreements, bilateral cooperation, survey/service provision contracts with offshore wind power investors around the world.Petrovietnam has received many offers from large corporations in the world such as Equinor, Orsted, CIP, or Macquarie to cooperate in developing offshore wind power projects in Vietnam.

In the past three years, PTSC has quickly joined the offshore wind power value chain.

To date, PTSC has won bids for more than 10 offshore wind power projects with a total generating capacity of 5.2 GW and a total contract value of more than 1.2 billion USD, providing most of the service stages for offshore wind power projects, including survey, design, procurement, construction, transport, installation, operation, maintenance and repair.

The projects create more than 4,000 direct jobs.In particular, PTSC has been coordinating with Sembcorp Group from Singapore to implement the first steps in cooperation to invest in offshore wind farms in Vietnam with an initial expected capacity of 2.3 GW, which will export electricity directly to Singapore via high-voltage submarine cables.

As soon as Vietnam’s legal framework are completed and the company is allowed to conduct surveys, exploit the sea area and export electricity, PTSC will launch the project to generate power commercially by 2035.To prepare resources for the offshore renewable energy development, Petrovietnam's key units in design, production, construction and operation of offshore oil and gas projects have been assigned to study and establish specialised working groups to develop the renewable energy value chain, and coordinate to seek opportunities at home and abroad./.