Electrification Solution for Greenfield and Brownfield Facilities Utilizing Offshore Floating Microgrids, as an Alternative to Power from Shore

The United Kingdom (UK) is driven to reduce offshore emissions by the North Sea Transition Deal (NSTD) agreed between industry and the government in March of 2021. This agreement requires the UK offshore industry to reduce emissions against a 2018 baseline, with interim goals on route to being net zero by 2050. The most pressing target is a 50% reduction by 2030. To achieve these goals, groups of facility operators and their Joint Venture (JV) partners have begun progressing power from shore solutions exclusively, thus not considering alternative electrification concepts. As a result, the North Sea Transition Authority (UK regulator) launched "The Decarbonization competition for the electrification of offshore oil and gas installations", working with the Department for Business, Energy & Industry Strategy (BEIS), to fund technical and commercial studies on alternative offshore electrification in the UK North Sea. With the benefit of this support, the Orcadian consortium has developed an off-grid, or Microgrid, approach to platform electrification, as an alternative to power from shore. The Orcadian consortium Microgrid delivers a practical and achievable solution, enabling field operators to meet and likely exceed the North Sea Transition Deal emission reduction commitments The key benefits of the Microgrid are: Emissions reductions – approaching an 80% reduction for offshore facilitiesLower costs – saving almost $2 billion and more than 25% cheaper than the power from the UK grid option, when capital and ten years of operating costs are included, for a subset of platformsA practical way for operators to meet their North Sea Transition Deal commitments in terms of both the emission reduction targets and timeframeDeliverable quickly, and in phases, which allows a staged deployment with a steadily improving reduction in emissionsOpportunities for re-use or redeployment – provides legacy infrastructure for the grid and/or other usersApplications beyond oil & gas to provide reliable, low carbon power to industry or national power grids.