Tag Archives: Ireland

Shell Acquires Majority Stake in the Celtic Sea Floating Wind Farm

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By Laura Hurst (Bloomberg) —

Royal Dutch Shell Plc agreed to buy a 51% stake in an Irish project to develop a floating wind farm in the Celtic Sea.

Simply Blue Energy’s Kinsale venture will develop the Emerald floating wind farm, with 300 megawatts of capacity initially and the potential to scale up to 1 gigawatt. The companies didn’t disclose the value of the deal.

Shell divested its upstream oil and gas assets in Ireland in 2018, but the new acquisition falls into a growing list of investments in renewable and low-carbon assets designed to help the company achieve climate goals set out last year. Earlier this week, the Anglo-Dutch supermajor bought the U.K.’s largest public electric vehicle charging network, while at the beginning of the month it invested in a waste-to-fuels plant in Canada.

“This project could provide green power to consumers and businesses alike and contribute towards Shell’s ambition to be a net-zero emissions business by 2050, or sooner,” Collin Crooks, Shell vice president for offshore wind, said in a statement.

The project will also help the Irish government meet its climate target of 5 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, Simply Blue Energy CEO Sam Roch-Perks said.

Shell has been involved in offshore wind since 2000 and has more than 6 gigawatts of wind projects in development, according to its website. Its wind assets are mostly in The Netherlands and the U.S.

Harland & Wolff: New Cruise Refurb Player

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Harland and Wolff with three Viking cruise ships one in the massive drydock.

Led by new owners InfraStrata, Harland & Wolff is lining up cruise ship drydocks for its two large docks in Belfast. A trio of Viking ships was among customers in 2020.

“It was part of a strategic acquisition,” said John Wood, CEO, InfraStrata. “There are no drydock facilities in the UK for cruise vessels. We have two docks, 556 meters and 335 meters, and they are ideally located for cruise ships in Belfast.”

The new owners have been busy investing in the facility, spending money on new dock gates, power lines and robotic welding equipment as well as other upgrades.

The 85-acre facility is also growing. When the new owners came aboard, there were 65 employees, which has grown to over 200, and a new office is being set up in Miami to better liaison with cruise customers, said Wood.

“We expect (this year) to be busy with cruise ships. Everyone has been out of service for the past nine months. We see the classification dockings ramping up as the ships come back into service,” Wood continued, saying he expects demand to increase in the first and second quarters as the industry stages a staggered return to service.

Financial

What will be a huge boost for the cruise industry will be export credit financing on refurbishment projects, Wood said.

“We have worked closely with the UK government and put a couple schemes together. It’s something the UK government wants to do, is to encourage cruise work, and we’ve got two of the biggest docks in Europe and intend to make Belfast one of the cruise refit centres.”

Plans eventually call for deepening the facility’s 556-meter dock, and so far, cruise customer has been happy to hear about export credit options, meaning they can pay for projects later.

“We’ve seen a real shift in the past six weeks. We’ve gone from cruise lines saying ‘Yeah we’ll look at March or April’ to ‘We’d like to dock between these dates and here are our specifications.’”

That has been based on a mix of an expected return to revenue service and export credit financing.

Wood has also gotten creative, hoping to deliver his customers better value for their refurbishment budgets.

“We are looking at docking three vessels in our big dock at once. This will drastically reduce the cost of the drydock for the owners and bring in the OEMs at the same time (for three ships),” he explained. “There are big cost savings there. We’re also working up another proposal around that concept of having two large vessels side-by-side in one dock.”

Excerpt from Cruise Industry News Quarterly Magazine: Winter 2020-2021

Lindblad’s National Geographic Orion to cruise Europe

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The National Geographic Orion.

Lindblad Expeditions’ National Geographic Orion vessel will spend the spring, summer and fall on a series of one-week cruises in Europe.

Itineraries include exploring Portugal, Spain, France, England, Ireland, Holland, Belgium, the Baltic republics and Scandinavia.

“A ship like National Geographic Orion depends heavily on past guests, and a vast majority of her past guests have been to the Kimberley and the South Pacific,” said Sven Lindblad, founder and president of Lindblad Expeditions. “We are committed to providing them the most compelling opportunities available on the Orion and have listened to their feedback for new destinations.”

Lindblad said the 22 voyages on the 102-guest ship will be led by a team with a a diverse scope of expertise about history, political science, art, viniculture and music of the destinations, and will include active options like hiking, biking and kayaking.