Offshore wind activity on US East Coast to drive newbuild vessel demand

As offshore wind activity increases along the US East Coast, a big ramp-up in port activity is expected; there is already evidence of this at ports in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. With this will come a demand for newbuild heavy lift vessels installation vessels specifically for the wind energy trades. The Washington, DC office of law firm Blank Rome, in a recent briefing to clients regarding the 2019 Coast Guard Authorization Act (CGAA), now under discussion in Congress, stressed the importance of this Act for the offshore sector. Of particular concern is the availability, or not, of Jones Act qualified installation vessels, as well as cable laying and repair vessels. So far, actual electricity generated from offshore wind in the East Coast US waters has been small. The “Block Island Wind Farm” project, in waters south of Narragansett, Rhode Island, has been producing 30 mW of (with six turbines) since late 2016. Atlantic Pioneer, a Jones Act compliant 12 passenger crewboat (officially Crew Transport Vessel, or CTV) to ferry workers out to the site was delivered from the Blount yard in Spring, 2016. In late 2018, Denmark-based Ørsted, one of the leaders in the sector, acquired Deepwater Win- the Block Island project’s developer, from its previous owners private equity investor D.E. Shaw. Deepwater Wind has been a successful bidder in a number of lease auctions sponsored by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the same agency which also handles leasing of oil and gas tracts along the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf.