European oil giants TotalEnergies and Equinor are backing an innovative ‘honeycomb’ floating wind farm mooring-spread design that promises to slash the cost of anchoring the fleet to be deployed in the coming decade, key to the sector’s commercialisation as installation accounts for some 20% of a deepwater project’s capital spend.

The so-called Honeymooring design, devised by offshore services contactor Semar and based around a daisy-chain network of shared buoys, synthetic fibre lines and anchors, has been model-tested to cut “hardware” costs by 50% compared to traditional steel-chain-and-anchor concepts that fix individual floating turbines to the seafloor.