New Offshore Wind Crew Transfer Vessel Launched in UK

Marine engineering consultancy BAR Technologies on Wednesday held the official launch of its first BARTech 30 crew transfer vessel (CTV) from its premises on The Camber, Portsmouth, UK.

BAR Technologies, Chair, Martin Whitmarsh - also Chair of the Offshore Wind Growth Partnership – led his BAR Technologies colleagues to officially hand over the first vessel of its type to its owner Seacat Services.

As part of the launch, the vessel was officially named ‘Seacat Columbia’ by Ian Baylis, Founder, Seacat Services and Martin Whitmarsh.

"The BARTech 30 was designed to address the two most pressing challenges of the offshore wind industry: vessel efficiency - and therefore emissions reduction - and the comfort in transfer, and subsequent effectiveness, of offshore wind engineers. In the first instance, many of the major offshore wind developers and owners are now beginning to look in earnest at the rates of fossil fuel consumption in wind farm service vessels," Bar Technologies said.L-R: Martin Whitmarsh - Chairman of BAR Technologies; Andy Page - Director and Naval Architect at Chartwell Marine; Simon Schofield - Chief Technology Officer at BAR Technologies; Ian Baylis - Founder of Seacat Services - Credit: Bar Technologies

Secondly, the company said, any offshore engineering personnel beset by sea-sickness in travel to a project must be returned to port – meaning in practice that a vessel transporting up to 24 engineers must cease its transit to a project site – resulting in expensive downtime for the project owner.

According to BAR Technologies, with its 30m ProA design, and active foiling systems to correct for pitch and roll, the BARTech 30 crew transfer vessel is able to minimize vessel motion and fuel burn – leading to an average increase in stability across all sea states of up to 70% and a reduction in total emissions of 30% over a typical operational profile.

Additionally, the company said, with the vessel able to operate in more challenging conditions than the current catamaran designs, offshore wind turbines may be serviced over a greater number of sea states, ensuring wind farm owners have more opportunities to better and more cost-effectively provide turbine maintenance.

Alongside the order for two vessels from Seacat Services, CTV operator High Speed Transfers has also ordered two BARTech 30s.