Competition is what drives people to think outside the box to gain an advantage. SSE Renewables and partners Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners & Marubeni Europower demonstrated the value of this as part of their successful East 1 ScotWind application. Together with Atkins & RockWave this project is now shortlisted for the Ground Engineering Magazine 2022 Technical Excellence Award!
When first scoping potential sites for new Offshore Wind Farm developments, desk studies are typically produced with the support of publicly available information to build an initial assessment of the proposed development. However, until now very few have attempted to use seismic data that was originally acquired for the benefit of the oil and gas industry. For this highly contested ScotWind site, RockWave & Atkins Ground Engineering and Tunnelling proposed to do just that.
RockWave utilised our Repurposing workflows to enhance the shallow resolution of the North Sea Transition Authority 2D dataset, a UK government-funded survey acquired in 2015 to generate exploration activity.
The Atkins Ground Engineering and Tunnelling team then used the Repurposed data to accurately map Quaternary sediment thickness across the site and identify possible geohazards such as depressions, tunnel valleys, faults and gas pockets that will require further investigation once UHR site investigations have been completed.
Employing these techniques early in the site assessment allowed for an improved initial understanding of risks and progression of foundation design concepts that could be built into the commercial considerations of the application, and…we’d like to think…made their technical assessment stand out from the competition!