You have been with Acteon for two decades now, and in the beginning of this year you became the CEO. What is your vision for the company going forward?
Acteon has been engaged in the energy transition since the late-1990's, so for the entire period in which I was with the company I got to experience its concept from the grassroots. Initially, our portfolio was concentrated on the oil and gas sector, but we organically moved towards renewable projects, where we evolved from wind turbine installation technologies to providing conceptual engineering design, offshore support, and inspection services. At the moment, renewable technologies take up 25% of our portfolio, while energy transition as a whole accounts for 40%. Through the vision I am trying to bring to the company I hope that in five years' time we will grow these percentages to 50% and 60% respectively. Although we currently lean more towards offshore wind projects, there are many other technologies (e.g., marine current turbines or wave energy generators) that can help drive the energy transition. However, in our pursuit for a greener future, we must remain realistic and besides focusing on renewables, we need to continue to innovate in oil and gas to reduce the impact of their development and production.
How does this shift reflect in your demand for new oil and gas installations?
The oil and gas sector has still not fully recovered from the major downfall of 2015. We saw a slight upside in 2018 and 2019, but then the pandemic and the war in Ukraine affected the sector again. Currently, oil and gas operators are focusing on investment into optimizing existing infrastructure. New developments are often tied back to existing facilities even over longer distances. What is still missing are big new developments in deepwater. All these particularities are reflected in our revenues, 50% of them coming from oil and gas OpEx and only 10% from CapEx, the exact opposite of the 2010 to 2014 period.
What is your roadmap to get renewables from 25% to 50% of your portfolio, and where do you expect to see most demand coming from?
The offshore renewables market is our fastest growing market and growing with this market will get us a long way in achieving our revenue goals from renewables. However, we do not only depend on new installations to grow our renewables portfolio. Our renewables clients see more and more value in our monitoring and inspection services for newly developed offshore windfarms but increasingly for installations that have been in operation for several years already.
Generally, technology is one of the keys to meeting our environmental objectives. What role does technology play in your activity, and are there any notable examples that make a difference?
Technological assets are certainly a key differentiator, and we try to develop products that address the specific needs of various markets. For example, in certain emerging Asia markets such as Korea and Japan, traditional foundation concepts will likely not work well due to the harder soil conditions than what we have been seeing in Europe. Our drilled foundations innovations will address that issue. Similar soil conditions can be found in certain European markets such as France. For one project we are in the process of developing a new subsea drilling unit capable of drilling 8.9m diameter holes subsea. Floating wind installations enable energy production in areas that were not explored before, but they require many complex mooring systems which lead to high installation costs that need to be addressed if we want to make these technologies adoptable on a large-scale.
Since the need for health monitoring is increasing, we are developing alternative concepts to provide these services at a lower price point and with a reduced carbon footprint. This can be achieved through the development of autonomous vessels that are smaller, cheaper and more fuel efficient. Digital services play another important role in achieving the same goal.
Our services are based on AI technology reducing the necessity of human intervention both offshore and onshore. One key technology we developed is the AI-supported autonomous anomaly detection which is able to monitor our offshore equipment.
We feed the data gathered back to our onshore data centers, where engineering specialists can analyze and optimize it much more easily. We are also using autonomous underwater vehicles for various survey tasks such as debris survey or pipeline inspection
Given Acteon's global footprint, what regions have you seen move fastest in the direction of net zero?
Probably the fastest going market is China, considering that last year they installed more offshore capacity than the Western world together. Strictly for wind projects, the U.S. East Coast is a strong region, closely followed by Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. In Europe, with the advent of new technology, we have seen offshore wind development in France, the Southern European countries, like Italy and Spain and the Baltic countries. Floating wind technologies seem to grow in Asia and California, as well as in deeper water regions in Europe outside the continental shelf.
Seeing how things are moving currently, are you optimistic for the green transition?
I like to believe that we can achieve our ambitious goals. If we look at what is planned in terms of offshore wind and energy generation efficiencies in deeper water, I feel we have a realistic chance provided we have the capital needed for the massive investment that will be required to make that happen.
