Page 7: of Offshore Engineer Magazine (Mar/Apr 2022)

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Pioneering Spirit ust when life and business seemingly started to get back on track in the wake of a global pandemic, Russia invades Ukraine – breaking a rules-based order in place since the end of the Second World War, putting the European continent, and in fact the world, on edge – and setting off a near immediate and mass

J exodus of Western energy companies from Russia; a dizzying chain of events in the span of a few weeks that promises to effectively rewrite the handbook on global energy exploration, production and supply for the coming generation.

Through it all, through oil’s per-barrel wild price ride over the last six plus years – from one point at the outset of the pandemic when futures pricing brie? y went sub-zero, rebounding to around $100 per as of this writing – time and again it is the innovators, the deep thinkers and the long-range planner that will ultimately help to shape the industry’s present and future.

Edward Heerema, founder and president of Allseas, is one of those innovators, featured this month in Elaine Maslin’s interview entitled ‘Dutch Courage – With a

Single Minded Focus’ starting on page 20. This list of Heerema’s contributions to the maritime and offshore sectors are long and distinguished, from bringing us the world’s largest construction vessel (Pioneering Spirit) to innovation in the pipelay and jacket lift sector. Today Heerema has his eyes on deepsea mining and the offshore wind market, regarding the latter a strong focus on the dramatically increasing size of the turbines and the equipment needed to install and maintain them, telling Offshore

Engineer, “We think Pioneering Spirit is a big vessel, but if you take the biggest windmill of the future, she is tiny in comparison.”

This month too, we interviewed another pioneer in the form of Per Lund, CEO,

Odfjell Oceanwind, a Norwegian start-up aiming to help the offshore oil and gas industry on it’s path toward decarbonizing its own operations. Odfjell Oceanwind is progressing to design and deliver Mobile Offshore Wind Units (MOWUs) that, essentially, are designed to be renewable ‘plug and power’ units for offshore operations.

OEDigital.com

As most reading these pages know all too well, while Norway is small in population at 220,887 just north of ? ve million, it packs equal if not more punch than world heavyweights monthly pageviews in the offshore and maritime sectors. Norway is ‘green’ not by slogan but by political will and choice, with the policies in place to help rationalize investment in and development of these next-generation technologies that, as history suggests, are born, nurtured and matured in Norway before being deployed for global operation.

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Gregory R. Trauthwein

Editorial Director & Associate Publisher [email protected] t: +1.212.477.6700 • m: +1-516.810.7405 march/april 2022 OFFSHORE ENGINEER 7