Hilde Solbakken

Norwegian Ambassador to Vietnam

Hilde Solbakken

Accelerating transition to net zero through ocean-based solutions: Lessons learned and good practice.

Norway's economic reliance on its oceans is pivotal, with ocean-based industries contributing significantly to its welfare and export earnings. As a leading figure in ocean research, responsible marine resource management, and a major player in shipping and seafood export, Norway is actively transitioning from traditional oil and gas production to renewable energy. This keynote speech, presented against the backdrop of COP26 and Vietnam's ambitious net-zero goals, shares Norway's experience and best practices in leveraging ocean-based solutions to combat climate change. It explores how such strategies could contribute one-fifth of the necessary annual greenhouse gas emissions reductions by 2050, keeping global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The speech delves into five key ocean-based climate action areas: investing in nature-based solutions, harnessing ocean-based renewable energy, decarbonizing ocean industries, securing sustainable future food sources, and implementing carbon capture and storage in the seabed. The Norwegian experience in developing offshore wind power is highlighted, showcasing the country's ambitious targets and the synergies between the maritime and energy sectors in this green transition. The role of integrated ocean planning is emphasized as a crucial framework for balancing environmental, industrial, and societal needs.

Overall, the speech underscores the criticality of a healthy ocean in the global fight against climate change, presenting a comprehensive approach that combines policy, industry innovation, and sustainable practices to achieve a prosperous, environmentally-resilient ocean-based economy.

Atilla Incecik

Professor of Offshore Engineering Associate Principal and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom

Prof. Atilla Incecik is Associate Principal, Executive Dean of Engineering and Professor of Offshore Engineering at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

Professor Incecik has been responsible for the development of design and analysis tools and model testing of marine and offshore engineering systems during his research activities both in industry and academia. His current research includes development of dynamic load and response prediction tools for ships, offshore platforms and marine renewable energy devices.

Professor Incecik is Research Manager of Industrial Doctoral Centre for Offshore Renewable Energy (IDCORE) and an advisory professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a visiting professor at Harbin Institute of Technology and Chair Professor at Zhejiang University. Professor Incecik is Editor-in-Chief of Ocean Engineering Journal. In May, 2019 Professor Incecik was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Chalmers University of Technology in recognition of his research on green shipping and environmental sustainability.

Atilla Incecik

Research and Development Activities in Ocean Renewable Energy

The presentation will start by the introduction to the Department of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Marine Engineering at the University of Strathclyde and its laboratories and computational facilities used for research in ocean renewable energy. The key research areas in the field of offshore wind, tidal and wave energy research will be summarized and some recent/current projects will be described. This will be followed by the description of a project – SUSLAND: Sustainable island Project which is the integration of an island with offshore aquaculture farm and renewable energy generation systems.

In the second part of the presentation the national UK Offshore Renewable Energy project: SUPERGEN will be described. SUPERGEN Project is a collaborative project carried out by ten UK universities. The core research activity in this project consist of five work packages which are

• WP1: Define the characteristics of aspirational ORE deployment scenarios required to meet changing demand for the period from 2025 to 2050 with associated benefits, risks and research priorities.
• WP2: Establish a set of site and condition characteristics for use, by the hub and the wider research community, as benchmarks to evaluate options for the array scale deployment of ORE technologies.
• WP3: Develop and validate models to support the confident prediction of ORE system performance, operation and environmental and societal impact.
• WP4: Develop and validate methods and tools needed for the design and evaluation of future ORE technologies enabling cost, risk and environmental impact reduction.
• WP5: Assess the potential of very large ORE structures, including floating, and address key technical challenges to the design, deployment and operation of such structures.

Maarten Vanneste

Principal Geoscientist Offshore Energy at Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, Norway

Maarten Vanneste graduated in Physics (1995) at the University of Ghent (Belgium), and received a PhD in Marine Geology and Geophysics at the same university (2000). He then joined the Marine Geology and Geophysics research unit at the University of Tromsø, Norway, as a Post-doc Researcher. Since 2006, he is a Principal Geoscientist in the Offshore Energy business area at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI, Oslo). His research interests include, amongst others, offshore geohazard assessments, integrated site characterization, geophysical mapping techniques (e.g., shear and surface wave seismics), quantitative seismic interpretation, gas hydrates and fluid flow. He also works intensively on developing site-specific ground models, using a data-driven approach for the integration of geophysical, geological and geotechnical data and information. He is Secretary of the ISO Technical Panel 19901-10 on Marine Geophysical Investigations, and Chairman of the bi-annual conference series Applied Shallow Marine Geophysics, initiated in 2014, under the umbrella of the EAGE Near-Surface Geoscience Division. He has (co-)authored over 70 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, and is peer- reviewer for many technical journals covering various fields of Geosciences and well as international R&D projects.

Maarten Vanneste

Data-driven ground models: the road to fully-integrated site characterization and design.

This keynote paper describes recent developments in optimizing the data-driven ground model approach, from acquisition to the full site characterization part, applicable for all types of offshore energy developments, with particular focus to offshore wind applications. For offshore renewables in shallow water depths, the sub-surface is often highly complex, due to the various large-scale geological processes that have affected these areas over the last millions of years. The result is that spatial variability is a key aspect to address over the entire work-flow, from geophysical and geotechnical data acquisition, processing, analysis, geostatistics and ultimately engineering design. The direct consequence is that the site has to be assessed in full 3D, which is rarely adopted for engineering applications on large scale. The data-driven approach exploits the benefits of the geological, geophysical and geotechnical data and integrates those into a consistent ground model. In this paper, we illustrate a number of ground model approaches – with variable levels of complexity – and present a few novel methods that will further enhance these models in the future.

Phillip Watson

Professor of Civil Engineering in the Centre for Offshore Foundation Systems at the University of Western Australia, Australia

Phil is the Shell Professor of Offshore Engineering and Director of the ARC Industrial Transformation Research Hub on Offshore Floating Facilities at University of Western Australia. He is a highly experienced offshore geotechnical engineer, with over 25 years industry experience and previously held the position of Global Director of GeoConsulting for Fugro. At Fugro he was a champion of innovation and technology development, working to integrate specialist consulting teams around the world, and with a commitment to sharing expertise and streamlining access to leading edge design approaches. Prior to joining Fugro, Phil was a Director of specialist geotechnical consulting firm Advanced Geomechanics, based in Perth.

Phil is a Fellow of The Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia, the current Chair of ISSMGE Technical Committee 209 ‘Offshore Geotechnics’, and a committee member of ISO Working Group 10 / API Resource Group 7.

Phillip Watson

Innovative research to support offshore renewable energy

The following is a brief summary taken from the keynote lecture.

• New challenges …
• • Foundations (Dynamically sensitive (stiffness), Low V/M ratio, New regions (soils))
• • Field layout (Spatial variability, Shared anchors (floating))
• • Installation (Noise, Low t/D ratios, Highly loaded spudcans)
• • Seabed (Scour, Cables (thermal))
• ... and much, much more

• In closing, offshore wind
• • is well established in the North Sea, and rapidly expanding
• • presents challenges that differ from conventional oil & gas projects
• • has low margins to work with
• • is putting pressure on supply chains
• Geotechnical solutions need to be efficient, robust and economic – while considering fabrication and environment constraints.
• It is an exciting time for both researchers and practitioners!

Ha-Duong Minh

Senior scientist at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France

Dr. Ha-Duong Minh is senior scientist at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France. As international expert on energy, climate change, society, economics and uncertainty, he was co-awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2007 as lead author of Assessment Report 4 and 5 of the IPCC. He founded the Vietnam Initiative for the Energy Transition (VIET) quasi-independent think tank in August 2018.

Ha-Duong Minh

Planning, policy and integration for sustainable development of offshore wind energy in Vietnam 2022 - 2050

The wind power sector took off in Vietnam after the feed-in tariff was raised to 8.5 UScents / kWh for onshore projects in 2018. As of March 2021, 113 wind projects with total capacity 6,038MW have signed a power purchase agreement. Most are expected to enter commercial operation before December 2021. We explore here three scenarios for wind power development in Vietnam through 2030. It argues that by 2030 the wind power installed capacity in the New Normal could be around 17 GW onshore and 10 GW offshore. In a Factor Three scenario, offshore wind reaches 21 GW by 2030. This has three policy implications. First, Vietnam’s next power development plan provides an important opportunity to increase at low costs the level of ambition of wind power development. Second, flexibility should be the guiding principle of the plan. Third, to realize the large potential of offshore wind power, infrastructure planning has to start soon.

Sung-Ryul Kim

Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Seoul National University, Korea

Professor Sung-Ryul Kim holds B.S. (1996), M.S. (1998) and Ph.D. (2003) in civil engineering from Seoul National University. He began his career with the faculty of Department of Civil Engineering at Dong-A University in 2005. He later joined the faculty of Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Seoul National University in 2017.

His researches focused on the foundation design including offshore suction bucket foundations, foundations in deep soft deposits, and aseismic design of foundations. He has studied the short and long-term stability of the suction bucket foundations by performing various numerical simulations and model tests. He has also worked on the design of deep foundations under the negative skin friction and the dynamic soil-pile-structure interactions by performing pile loading tests, numerical simulations and shaking table model tests. He has published numerous journal articles related to the foundation designs.

Professor Sung-Ryul Kim is currently the Chair of the Technical Committee for Foundation Design in Korean Geotechnical Society and the Technical Committee for Aseismic Design of Geotechnical Structures in the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea. He served as the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Korean Geotechnical Society from 2017 to 2020. He is currently a Senior Editor of the Journal of Korean Society of Civil Engineers(KSCE). He has received professional awards including the 2007 Young Research Award from the Korean Geotechnical Society, Excellent Paper Award from the Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies and Presidential Award from KSCE.

Sung-Ryul Kim, Seongho Hong, Ssenyondo Vicent

Experimental Observations on Suction Bucket Foundations Under Vertical Pullout Loading

The south Korean government through the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy is progressively promoting construction of offshore wind farms in the south western sea of the Korean Peninsula. The project is aimed to increase the nation's wind power generation to 12GW by 2030. The construction of 400MW and 2GW plants is scheduled to commence in 2022 and 2023, respectively. It is estimated that nearly 2.46GW will be generated by 2028, which is enough to supply electricity to 2.24 million house holds. Due to shallow waters and favorable soil conditions of this locality, tripod bucket foundations have been identified as feasible support foundations for the offshore wind turbine structures. The impact of wind and wave loads on the wind turbine structure can cause uplift of a bucket which destabilizes the entire tripod group, ultimately causing breakdown of the whole system. It is therefore necessary to study the pullout capacity of the suction bucket. The pullout capacity is significantly affected by the drainage condition of the soil during loading. Model tests were conducted on the bucket to evaluate the static pullout capacity. The pullout capacity of the bucket was varied according to different loading rates, which induced drained to undrained conditions in surrouding soils. The relation between the suction force inside the bucket and the pullout capacity are discussed in detail. A simple approach is proposed for the evaluation of the pullout capacity under drained and undrained conditions.

Keywords: suction bucket, model test, drainage condition, pullout capacity, sand.

Quoc Tuan Tran

Professor, CEA-LITEN, National Institute for Solar Energy (INES), France

Prof. Quoc-Tuan TRAN received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering and his “Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches” degree (Dr. Habil) from the Grenoble Institute of Technology (Grenoble-INP), France, in 1993 and 2000, respectively. He is actually Professor at the INSTN (Paris Saclay University) and International Expert at the CEA (Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission), Scientific Manager for Smart Grids at the CEA LITEN/INES (National Institute for Solar Energy) and Teacher at the INSTN (Paris Saclay University), the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble, Grenoble-Alpes University and the Polytechnic Institute of Paris. His research interests are in the fields of smart-grid, microgrid, power system, renewable energy, and energy management and control. He holds 8 patents, is (co-)author of seven books, and author of more than 200 publications in journals and conference proceedings. He has supervised more than 50 PhD students. He has realized and piloted more than 50 projects. He is senior member IEEE.

Quoc Tuan Tran

Offshore Wind Farm Integration to grids

As sources of conventional energy are alarmingly being depleted, leveraging renewable energy sources (RES), especially wind power, has been increasingly important in the electricity market to meet growing global demands for energy. Due to their intermittent characteristics with high levels of uncertainty and complexity, the integration of wind power into the existing grid infrastructures, can cause several impacts on the grid operation include voltage variations, frequency variation, stability, protection and challenges for managing… A better knowledge, analysis and evaluation methods of the induced constraints become necessary in order to have a good development and operation. This presentation concerns:

• Technology and architectures of offshore transmission
• Modelling
• Grid code
• Control and protection
• Integration and ancillary services
• Applications in Vietnam.

Keywords: Wind power, architecture, Modelling, Control, and Integration

Bernard Casey

Development Director at Mainstream Renewable Power, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Bernard is Project Director for the flagship 1400MW offshore wind farm being developed by Mainstream Renewable Power in joint venture with the Phu Cuong group in Soc Trang Province, Vietnam. He graduated in civil engineering from University College Dublin, Ireland and has a master’s degree in soil mechanics from Imperial College London. Since graduation, he has more than 30 years experience in the power industry, including onshore and offshore wind, some of which was spent with ESB International in both consulting engineer and EPC Contractor roles. Bernard has been with Mainstream Renewable Power for 12 years and prior to the current role in Vietnam was Head of Offshore Engineering in the Mainstream London office. As Head of Offshore Engineering he responsible for technical direction of Mainstream’s 5.6GW offshore wind portfolio in UK and Germany.

Bernard Casey

Challenges and technical solutions for offshore wind projects in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam

The first nearshore wind farm developed in Vietnam was commissioned in 2016 in Bac Lieu province, with the turbines connected to shore by walkways within which the array cables were integrated. Since that time a number of other nearshore projects have commenced construction in Tra Vinh, Ben Tre, Soc Trang and Bac Lieu. A common feature of all these projects is the deep soft marine deposits that necessitate long piles, and the difficult inter-tidal conditions that increase the cost of construction.

This paper examines the design concepts being used at these projects and draws on learnings that Mainstream has made in developing the 1400MW offshore wind farm in Soc Trang that is in preparation for a construction start in Q4 2021.