Tag Archives: UK

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

P&O Cruises still planning Iona celebration in Southampton

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P&O Cruises is still planning a celebration for when new ship Iona arrives in Southampton to begin her maiden sailings but said it would “judge the mood of the nation” first.
President Paul Ludlow said the new ship was looking “stunning” and would be “unlike anything ever seen before for the British market”.
He said: “It’s our intention to keep her in Europe when she comes to Southampton and we will absolutely celebrate her arrival into the UK. It will be such a feel-good moment that it would be remiss of us not to. But we will have to judge the mood of the nation.
“It’s difficult to predict the future at the moment, so until things are more certain, we will hold back with details of this event.”
Speaking as he launched the line’s summer 2022 programme, Ludlow said Iona’s sister ship was still on track for delivery in December 2022 and that steel-cutting for this vessel was due to take place in Germany before the end of this year.
He said bookings for the second half of 2021 were at the “upper end of historic levels”, those for spring 2022 had “surpassed the upper end of historic levels” and that summer 2022 pre-registrations were “akin to previous years”.

Ludlow said some bookings for 2022 were by customers whose 2020 cruises had been cancelled and who were redeeming their Future Cruise Credits.
“The majority of people took FCCs over a refund when their cruises were cancelled,” he said. “And of those who took an FCC, 50% have utilised it already. So that leaves 50% who are still waiting to utilise it. There were some who had bookings for 2020 and 2021, so they have been waiting to use the 2020 FCC in 2022.”
Ludlow also said that not all bookings were by loyal guests and that the “new to cruise market hasn’t completely gone away”.
“In the first, three or four months, new to cruise volumes actually exceeded my expectations,” he said. “That’s slowed down a little bit but even so, it’s exceeded my expectations as to how many new-to-cruise people wanted to book.”
Ludlow added: “For people taking their first cruise, the consideration period is lengthy. By the time they had invested all that time, [the pandemic] has not been enough for them to say ‘it’s no longer for me’.”