Dredging starts Ardersier Port transformation
Dredging works have started in Scotland which will enable the reopening of a repurposed Ardersier Port as Europe’s first fully circular Energy Transition Facility.
In the 1970s Ardersier, a vast and currently unused port 14 miles east of Inverness, was one of the largest oil rig fabrication yards in the world, employing up to 4,500 workers. Covering an area of 162ha and with more than 1km of quayside, Ardersier is the largest brownfield port in the UK.
The port’s new owners have an agreement with floating offshore wind developer BW Ideol guaranteeing the latter exclusive access to the port for the manufacture of their concrete floating wind foundations.
The nine month, £20m dredging works will enable the creation of an oil rig decommissioning facility which will recycle oil rigs of the past to make the foundations for future floating offshore windfarms. Some 2.5 miilion m3 of sand dredged to reopen the port will be beneficially reused in an onsite concrete production plant.
Decommissioning of old oil rigs is expected to provide some 100,000 tonnes of scrap steel yearly, which will be recycled in a £300 million ‘green’ steel mill utilising an electric arc furnace powered by renewable energy, the UK’s first new steel mill in half a century. The recycled steel produced will be used as reinforcement for concrete floating wind foundations. The entire scheme will contribute substantially to an offshore wind market which is predicted to deliver 29,000 jobs and £43.6 billion to the UK economy by 2050.
“At Ardersier we can lead the UK’s Green Industrial Revolution by using circular eceonomy practices to deliver new low carbon infrastructure built on the by-products of our oil and gas past”, said Ardersier Port owner Steve Regan.
