Andy Brooks discusses the energy transition and how to solve the Rubik's cube dilemma of fitting different technologies in the North Sea.
Now, Before I ask you to picture the North Sea as a Rubik’s cube, I would like to tell you all a quick story about my experience of the famous toy.
I remember getting one as a child thinking you must have to be some kind of wizard to solve it, so I put it in a cupboard and never touched it again.
Fast forward to the present day and my 11yr old daughter decided to join the Rubik’s club at school. And to join the club you of course needed a Rubik’s cube (other brands of cube are available or course)
Now, you may or may not know that when you buy a Rubik’s cube, they come solved. I bought two for my daughter and to her devastation her younger brother played “the annoying younger brother” card perfectly and decided to mess them up, deeply upsetting her.
I remember all my childhood anxiety coming back thinking how on earth do you solve a Rubik’s cube. The answer to that impossible problem? YouTube.
After watching numerous videos, and plenty of colourful language (not in front of the kids of course) I was able solve the cubes and regain some dad points in the process.
With thanks to her club my daughter can now solve a Rubik’s cube easily in about 30 seconds, no matter how much her younger brother messes it up much to his annoyance!
For most of us, when you look at a Rubik’s cube, solving it is an impossible task.
But it turns out that, when you break it down, it is simply a logic problem that can be solved with practice, which can be accelerated with the help of technology (YouTube).
What I am trying to say here is that what seemed an impossible task is now a much simpler problem to solve.
The North Sea Cube
A scrambled Rubik’s cube can easily represent the UK’s offshore energy system right now.
Imagine each colour as a different part of this diverse mix.
Instead of the colours like blue, green, red and yellow. You have oil and gas, offshore wind, CCS and hydrogen
But there are far more other users of the sea than there are colours on a cube.
By adding more colours to a Rubik’s cube, it becomes even more challenging and complicated. The same can be said by adding new industries to the North Sea.
So how do we, as an integrated energy industry, who share the common goal of achieving net zero, start to solve the Rubik’s cube that is the North Sea?
Solving it
The offshore space is becoming increasingly busy and the NSTA considers that co-location of different energy systems and technologies is entirely possible. We are actively working with others to drive a co-ordinated approach to managing the seabed.
Different energy activities can co-locate and co-exist offshore, with spatial overlaps managed through early engagement and co-ordination, careful sequencing of activities, and deployment of specific technology.
We are already doing this, and today is a prime example of that.
As I am speaking to you now the NSTA have opened nominations for potential carbon storage locations as we look to build on the success of the HyNet and Endurance sites.
In collaboration with the Crown Estate and Crown Estate Scotland, we are asking industry to nominate areas for future carbon storage licences, demonstrating through early engagement that we are not dictating the areas we think are right, but working together to encourage higher quality applications to optimise the potential of the seabed. Previous co-location success stories have led us to this point.
Windfarm leases and oil and gas licences are already co-locating in several places, in particular in the Southern North Sea.
The Dudgeon wind farm overlaps directly with the Blythe and Elgood fields. The infrastructure and vessel traffic have been coordinated between the operators to allow each other to successfully co-exist.
And in the Irish Sea you have the Walney Extension and the Rhyl gas field, both operating in harmony.
Of course, it’s not always easy and for a long time it was taken as fact that while we might be able to get oil and gas to work in parallel with wind farms, carbon storage was a face of the cube too many.
Opinions on that have started to mellow however. Technology in this field has advanced greatly and can be the answer to the problems we need to overcome.
For example, companies such as Fugro and Oceaneering offer unmanned surface vessels which carry out underwater inspections, taking up less room between turbines and oil and gas platforms, in addition to having lower emissions than manned vessels.
CCS measuring, monitoring and verification technology is now becoming standard in many operators technology plans, and piloted in the recent appraisal well test by Perenco in the UK Southern North Sea.
By having fibre optic sensing avoids the need for vessels to sail amongst offshore installations to shoot seismic data and the seismic data originally shot to locate oil and gas is now being used to identify sites for CCS.
The NSTA’s UK National Data Repository contains an abundance of this and other free information, dating back 60 years, which has been used for numerous world-leading academic research studies.
And AI will play a crucial role as well, helping industry solve complex planning challenges.
The energy industry has proven over the decades its ability to solve seemingly impossible problems.
To solve the Rubik’s cube that is the North Sea will require industry and regulatory coordination, transparency and a willingness to come together to resolve the problems we must overcome to help achieve our net zero goals and, it will be the people within our industries today that will ultimately find the solutions needed.
I finish where I started by talking about my daughter. Rather than look at a Rubik’s cube as an impossible challenge, through application of logic she can solve it consistently regardless of the starting point so that it is simply not a problem at all. Albeit the annoying younger brother is still an issue for her.
If we as an industry can do the same with the North Sea, we can help provide that clean energy the UK needs.
Thank you