In the coming years, the world’s oceans will see a growing development of marine infrastructures including offshore wind farms, marine aquaculture farms and offshore ports.  Whilst the need for such developments is dictated by the over-exploitation of coastal resources and ecosystems, it is essential to ensure that offshore developments are sustainable.  The development of such infrastructure must draw upon knowledge and technology across a wide range of disciplines, in order to reduce social and economic costs and minimise the impacts on marine ecosystems

The development of such structures and facilities induces increasing pressures and must be implemented in an integrated and sustainable way in order to limit the impacts on the marine ecosystems.

Multi-Use Platforms at Sea (MUPS) can represent a solution to meet these growing demands of competition for space as well as socio-economic benefits for the different activities.

However, cost is a major barrier that needs to be overcome if such integrated facilities are to become economically attractive. Experience from the offshore wind sector, which has explored the concept of floating platforms to carry wind turbines in deep, offshore waters (mostly in a single-use configuration), indicates that increasing productivity to cover fixed platform costs is critical.

The ENTROPI project will analyse the capabilities enabling multi-use offshore platforms to highlight where targeted innovation could achieve a significant cost reduction, and define investment propositions to make those innovations happen.

ENTROPI will also evaluate the potential scale-up of deployment, to estimate the advantages achievable through economies of scale and from incremental cost reduction as the installed base expands.

Specific areas that the ENTROPI project will be exploring include:

1. Multi-Use Platform design optimisation

2. Anchoring & mooring of MUPS

3. Monetising MUP output streams

4. Integration of surveillance, security & enforcement roles

5. MUP infrastructure for offshore operations

Marine South East is leading this new European funded project and will be coordinating business engagement activities at various stages of the project.

ENTROPI is co-funded by the EU Maritime and Fisheries Fund - to sign-up to the Interest Group to receive information about events, findings and downloads and future projects please visit https://mseinternational.org/interest_groups/offshore/