Development of the world’s biggest offshore wind farm at Dogger Bank off the UK has already seen the benefits of an “unbelievable number of synergies” with the oil & gas supply chain, said the renewables chief of Equinor as he claimed the two sectors are “branches of the same tree”.

Pål Eitrheim, executive vice president for New Energy Solutions at the Norwegian energy giant, which is building the 3.6MW Dogger Bank along with UK utility SSE, said access to resources and expertise from Equinor’s wider business is proving a significant asset to the project.

“Oil & gas and offshore wind are branches of the same tree,” said Eitrheim, citing estimates by the International Energy Agency (IEA) that 40% of lifecycle costs of an offshore wind development have significant synergies with an offshore oil & gas project.

“When I look at the synergies between what we are doing offshore on the oil & gas side, and what we are facing on the offshore wind side, there are so many overlaps it's just unbelievable. I see more and more a supplier base active in both,” he told Recharge.

“We’re now capturing those synergies in the Dogger Bank project.”

Dogger Bank is using the high-voltage direct current (HVDC) team employed on the Norwegian group’s new Johan Sverdrup offshore oil development – the third largest field on the Norwegian continental shelf – to help deliver the wind farm’s offshore substations.

“Our experience from Johan Sverdrup has resulted in solutions that are more cost-efficient than comparable offshore wind susbstations,” claimed Eitrheim, adding that the wider Equinor business allows him to tap into a range of technical and commercial resources in a renewables sector that requires “relentless focus on costs”.

Renewable energy will be the fastest-growing part of Equinor over the next few years.

Eitrheim said Dogger Bank signposts the direction of travel for future fixed-bottom offshore wind projects, where scale will be crucial to compete on levelised cost of energy.

The project is also using the world’s largest available offshore wind turbine, GE’s 12MW Haliade-X, but Eitrheim won’t be limited to that turbine nameplate as a minimum benchmark for future projects in an era when 15MW or even larger machines are being mooted.

“I am not driven by the scale of the turbines as such. I’m looking at the best business case and the best return [on a] project I can have,” he told Recharge. “I don’t go in and say I have to have a certain type of turbine.”

But the Equinor executive added: “In general, what I see is an industry where innovation is happening very, very fast. Clearly when we look to 2030 and beyond, the likelihood we’re going to be installing 12MW turbines is very low.”

Dogger Bank, which won in a UK government power auction last year and is due online from 2024, is the biggest step forward in offshore wind so far by Equinor, which on Thursday said it wants to have up to 16GW of renewable energy operating by 2035, up from about 500MW now.

Equinor said it expects to inject $500m-$1bn in annual capital spending into its New Energies unit’s projects this year and next, rising to $2-$3bn in 2022 and 2023, against a backdrop of total group capital expenditure of around $12bn in 2022/23.

Eitrheim – who was given a top-billing to update investors and journalists on the progress of New Energy Solutions at Equinor’s annual market update day in London – is quick to respond to suggestions that some will inevitably brand the target as ‘greenwashing’ by a company still dominated by oil and gas exploration, production and distribution.

“I don’t do greenwashing,” he said. “What we’ve put out today is a fast-growth, industrial renewable energy strategy.

“We will be the fastest-growing part of Equinor over the next few years.”

Wind

'Unbelievable oil & gas synergies' boosting world's biggest offshore wind build: Equinor chief