Havyard, Fafnir earn Environmental Award for newbuild PSV (Gallery)

Yesterday, February 18, Havyard Group and Fafnir Offshore were presented with the Environmental Award at the annual Offshore Support Journal Conference in London.

They won the award for newbuild 126, a Havyard 833 WE ICE platform supply vessel with hybrid battery power that Havyard is building for Fafnir.

Pushing the envelope for the environment

Havyard says it devotes extensive resources to research and development in order to produce ship designs that are safe, cost-efficient and environmentally friendly. This has produced results in the form of orders from both the offshore oil industry and the renewable energy industry.

Build 126, which is a platform supply vessel of the Havyard 833 WE ICE type, is also a result of Havyard’s strong focus on operating economy and the environment. Arve Helsem Leine, Design Manager at Havyard Design & Solutions, says that it is profitable to invest in R&D that focuses on environmentally friendly products.

“In order to achieve sustainable development, you have to think about the environment,” says Design Manager Leine. “This is a focus area both for us and for our customers, and it gives us opportunities in traditional segments such as offshore oil and in new segments such as offshore wind power production. When we can deliver environmentally friendly service vessels for wind power production, we actually achieve double the environmental gain,” Leine says.

“The offshore oil industry has also focused on the environment for a long time, and this puts pressure on us to continue to develop environmentally friendly solutions. The Havyard 833 WE ICE design that we will deliver to Fafnir is an excellent example of this. When we developed the first WE design, the challenge was to push the envelope in terms of designing a ship that would use even less fuel under actual operating conditions, thereby reducing harmful emissions to the natural environment. We focused on the foreship and stern and arrived at a hull design that resulted in significant savings in fuel consumption in both calm and harsh weather. With build 126, we have taken this yet another step further and, in cooperation with Norwegian Electric Systems, integrated a hybrid battery powered diesel-electric propulsion system.”

“We will not stop there, and we are constantly coming up with new ideas for how we can be at the forefront of the development of new, environmentally friendly solutions in cooperation with our strategic partners. Expertise throughout the value chain is the key, and we look forward to exploiting the possibilities that exist in the different markets,” says the enthusiastic Design Manager Leine.

A courageous pioneer

Icelander Steingrímur Erlingsson, who is the founder, owner and head of Fafnir Offshore, has a background as a fishing boat owner, and his merits also include running a shipping company in Canada. He was looking for new investment opportunities after having sold his interests in the fisheries industry, when his eyes fell on the offshore oil industry. Build 126 is the second offshore vessel he has ordered from Havyard. Erlingsson and Fafnir were also the first to order Havyard’s new WE design. ‘Polarsyssel’, a Havyard 832 L WE design, was developed for Fafnir and delivered from Havyard’s yard in Leirvik in Sogn in September last year. ‘Polarsyssel’ was designed to operate for the Governor of Svalbard for six months of the year. It serves as a platform supply vessel for the rest of the year. Steingrímur is also a pioneer in the renewable energy field, and he owns two out of the four windmills that have been installed in Iceland.

“When you are a fisherman raised on Iceland, you have learnt that hard work and adaptability are important success factors,” says Steingrímur Erlingsson. Fishing is hard work and the fish are not always easy to catch, so it is often someone with experience and the courage needed to make untraditional choices who succeeds in landing the fish, Havyards says. It is a matter of seeing an opportunity and taking it, the company adds.

Erlingsson brought that mentality with him when he moved into the offshore industry. Havyards says that the fact that he received the Courage Award 2014 at Fearnley Offshore Supply’s annual conference in Oslo last week is testimony to this, as is the Environmental Award at the OSJ conference in London that he shared with Havyard.

“I am pleased to have won the Environmental Award in London together with Havyard,” says Erlingsson. “We should probably have shared the courage award from Fearnley as well, since they dared to take a chance on an Icelandic fisherman who wanted an offshore vessel in 2012. Not everyone saw that business opportunity, and the cooperation we have established makes me confident that Havyard will continue to be a key partner for Fafnir in the further development of the company,” says ship owner Steingrímur Erlingsson.

Battery pack

Norwegian Electric Systems has developed and deliver a QUEST® 2 (Quadro Energy Storage Technology) battery system for the vessel, which will be the first vessel to be equipped with this system. The battery pack supplies power to the main switchboards via an AC / DC converter.

“Installing our QUEST® system on the vessel will reduce emissions and save fuel and money,” says Jan Berg, EVP Business Development at Norwegian Electric Systems. “We started the development of QUEST® 1 and QUEST® 2 three years ago. Our thorough analyses of the vessel’s operating profiles now show that the savings will exceed our initial calculations. Fuel consumption can be reduced by 5 to 20% in transit, by 25 to 35% in port, and by up to 35% in DP2 (dynamic positioning) mode.”

“Battery technology is developing rapidly, and capacity and output are improving in relation to volume and weight all the time. This shows that we are on the right track with our hybrid electric systems. Norwegian Electric Systems is proud to be a key partner for Fafnir Offshore in the work of taking this environmentally friendly ship to a market where emissions to the natural environment represent a challenge,” Jan Berg concludes.

Build 126, Havyard 833 WE ICE

The idea behind a hybrid battery-powered diesel-electric propulsion system is the same as for hybrid cars: to produce energy as efficiently as possible, while having access to power when it is needed.

The energy requirements of a typical PSV will vary greatly, depending on what operations it carries out. When the vessel sails from A to B, its need will not be the same as when it is stationary alongside an offshore platform. Weather and wind conditions, waves and currents will also cause energy requirements to change quickly. In a conventional diesel-electric propulsion system, the load on the diesel generators will vary in step with variations in the energy needs. As a result, the diesel engines cannot constantly operate within a load range where their fuel consumption is as low as possible. With hybrid battery power, the diesel generators can be run at optimum load all the time. When the power needs vary, the batteries can be charged or power drawn from them depending on whether the power need is lower or higher than the capacity of the diesel generators that are in operation.

The response time when the power need varies is also much shorter, which means that power can be directed more quickly to the vessel’s propellers and thrusters to ensure even more precise and safe positioning, for example during operations near offshore rigs.

Havyard explains that the combination of the Havyard 833 WE ICE hull design and hybrid battery power result in a PSV that will use between 30 and 40% less fuel than traditional PSVs during certain operations. This will also lead to a corresponding reduction in emissions of environmentally harmful gases such as CO2, NOx and SOx, Havyard concludes.