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Nicole Johnson Murphy, CEO of ECO TLP, and Gordon Jackson join to discuss concrete floating wind foundations, production-line construction, and markets from Hawaii to Japan.

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Allen Hall: Offshore wind obviously is a big deal right now. There’s a lot of, countries looking at it and investigating it, doing it, but not really at scale yet. And this is where ECO TLP comes in and. Nicole, let’s just start there with a background. What problem were you trying to solve when you started ECO TLP?

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Yeah, so, we were designing for, a site off of Hawaii in 2011, for the HECO RFP. And so we were designing for 300 meter water depth from the beginning. so we were always trying to find a way to work with the ports, with the vessel, with the infrastructure that was existing off Hawaii. And with, and that worked with Jones Act vessels.

So we were always trying to meet that [00:01:00] requirement with, and meet the cost, try to, we saw there were much tighter margins in offshore wind than in oil and gas, for example, at that water depth. So we’re trying to find something that was cost effective. 

Allen Hall: Next question, obviously is what makes those deep water foundations so difficult?

Gordon Jackson: It’s the water depth, primarily, you need to put foundations down in, extremely deep water. and they’re gonna be pretty flexible. so you’re trying to control the amount of motion that you get at the surface through your, your deep water, facility. it’s really.

Really that challenge, and, the weight of components through the water depth, likes of chain would be completely impossible. in 300 meters of water. you need to use something that’s a little bit lighter. Yeah, to mow you to the, to the seabed.

Allen Hall: [00:02:00] Because it does seem a little odd just not to make the foundations taller, basically.

More steel drive it down in, we know that process, we understand that process. It works offshore, near shore in a, lot of locations. But once you get to what depth as it becomes financially or engineering wise, impossible. 

Gordon Jackson: For offshore wind, fixed, structures in, maybe a hundred meters of water are gonna be.

Economic. they’ll be costly compared to what’s been done now because, of all the extra structure you need for the, for the deeper water. But, I think you’ll see, a crossover between fixed and floating, around the, 70 to a hundred meter water mark.

that’s sort the range.

Allen Hall: And that leads to the next question, which is. It’s all financial, right? At some point, the numbers [00:03:00] don’t work. If the cost of foundations don’t come down, especially in fixed bottom offshore or floating offshore, we lose a lot of offshore wind resource. Nicole can you gimme a scale at what we’re missing if we don’t get to a more economical solution for floating offshore?

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: So we’ve estimated for our market for, a very deep water market. So we now actually have a solution that goes across all water depths. So we’re starting with, this, gravity based structure now with, and, Gordon’s team has been really involved in that, development. And then now we can take that same slip form, concrete cylinder.

Format and take it across all the water depths. so we basically can hit every water depth now for a very low cost. It’s a very simple, just, local, regionally designed and built, system. We, crowdsource the labor and the inputs. and so we [00:04:00] try to, and we also try to give the procurement team of our clients their, an ability to do their job and, be able to bid out aspects of our design, across.

Different vendors. So you always wanna give, in construction, you always wanna give, the procurement team a job to do so they can actually get that price, keep that price down on the installation. 

Allen Hall: Yeah, that’s a unique look that ECO TLP is putting to this problem. Which is moving away from steel, which is expensive obviously, and it’s difficult to transport at times to a more localized solution, which is concrete.

And thinking about the problem a little bit differently, does that open up a number of doors then in terms of the countries that can get involved in, floating or near shore, wind projects, but just because you’re driving the cost down? 

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Absolutely. And I’ll let Gordon speak to that.. He’s worked. His whole career in offshore concrete.

But I think it’s, I think it’s a, great, it’s the only way we would do it. We actually have shipyards in our companies, our partners own [00:05:00] shipyards, and we, just would never probably ex try to create this many units across the world and scale and steel. We’d only do concrete. 

Gordon Jackson: Yeah. My first concrete project broke the mold of how you do, construction of concrete offshore structures.

it was entirely built within a dry dock and, After we’d gone on and delivered that project, that was in the late eighties. I spent the next 10 years, working on projects all around the world, looking at doing the same sort of thing in different countries. because you only needed, 10, 12 meters of water, at the shore and you could, build a structure and get it out there in the water.

It really opened up the market for offshore concrete structures that, that, first project that we did. 

Allen Hall: So using that first project as leverage and knowledge of how to do these things, how much advantage [00:06:00] does concrete give you over steel?

Gordon Jackson: It’s difficult to say because it bends country to country. And, quite often you’re competing against, steel built in some, very low cost fabrication countries. so if you’re in a high cost, high labor cost country, I worked in Australia, and the labor cost there was extremely high. So concrete wasn’t particularly cheap, but the overall solutions that we came up with, were cheap.

Allen Hall: So does that involve basically like slip forms or how are you, thinking about that problem? Because it’s a huge engineering task and you only learn. By doing it on some level because all great plans, always run into trouble as soon as you try to implement them. So you took all that previous knowledge and then applied it to this problem, and now you have, basically [00:07:00]trimmed or, slimmed, the design down into, you have a, very economical model, even in more uneconomical economies because of labor laws and cost of labor and access and those kind of things.

What does that look like now? And what’s your thought process on, Hey, this is what it’s gonna look like? Can we get, quayside how do we do this and how do we keep this thing simple?

Gordon Jackson: The key thing is we’re looking at, a production line approach, which has been, it’s tried and tested for, for marine, concrete construction, construction of quay walls and and the we’re using exactly that same system.

We’ve just been tried and tested to create a production line of, ECO TLP units or ECO GBS units where we’re building, onshore and where we’re going from station to station, doing a task at each station. [00:08:00] So it’s exactly like a production line, that you’re be familiar with and, you load out the completed structure onto a barge, and then you.

Submerge that barge and your structure floats off and that’s, the real key to getting the, the economy from the concrete basis. 

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Yeah, and I’ll say that the OpEX is really something we focus a lot on because it’s not just what you’re doing on the CapEx and the development and the port, it’s actually that 30 year lifetime maintenance.

And this is a, when you, we fully submerge our floater, which is basically inert in the ocean. It’s, very eco-friendly with the ocean. There’s no paint, there’s no, maintenance on the floater over the lifespan. You’re, monitoring those, the moorings and the, weight of any marine, buildup on those moorings and things like that.

But generally it’s a very low maintenance solution and it’s very heavy and a comfortable car [00:09:00] ride for the turbine. It really has slow motions. it’s, almost like a, a high skyscraper in the water. you’re just the top of that skyscraper is moving a little bit. But you’re, you’re really giving it that comfortable, slow ride over its lifetime.

It’s not hitting a lot of turbulence, like a different type of floater. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. It is a different concept, really, right? That you have this mass at the bottom and you have this mass at the top, which is the, cell on the wind turbine. And if you can design it just right, everything dampens becomes stable.

Even in turbulent water. How long did it take you to figure out that aspect of the design? Because it does seem like a lot of projects hit a, an end point right there because the motion of the turbine is not good for the lifetime of the turbine. 

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: We, look at it as a, kind of hybrid spar, TLP so, the original design came from my late father who was, who had designed Ekofisk for Phillips [00:10:00] petroleum in the early.

Late sixties, And, so he’d come from oil and gas and he’d come from that concrete, construction background. And, he is very comfortable with it. And I think, Gordon, that’s part of why I like working with Gordon ’cause Gordon has that same, long-term view on, these construction principles.

And I think that, what we saw though is the margins are so different from oil and gas, and so you have to have almost a poor man’s TLP is what we would call it because it’s. It’s gotta be a very simple version of a TLP that can roll out in mass quantities. And, as coming up with a company that, business plan, you’d wanna be able to really scale the business.

And so we had to come up with something that you can make. In different parts of the world at the same time, you’re not tied to one shipyard or one construction. \

Allen Hall: Even in terms of ship usage, you’re going to reduce the size of the ship considerably. You’re not using big dedicated ships that are really [00:11:00]expensive to operate or to keep in the area, even just to have them there as a lot of money.

You’re thinking about, a different design in terms of. Simple ships that you can find locally. How much does that really lower the cost of deployment? 

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Quite a lot actually. it depends on, so the other, there’s this other, aspect of installing the wind turbine on the foundation. So we have this fixed to fixed platform concept where you come further, a little bit further offshore and, give you that, draft depth that we need.

And then we have a fixed platform that just stays in place and, we bring the turbines to it and, float them out. It’s all a self floating unit, whether it’s the GBS that, Gordon’s been working with us and or the ECO TLP. So we’re really independent of those large vessels. for the most part, we’re, really try and then you, once you install the turbine, you can tow the entire unit out with two tugs.

Two to three tugs. 

Allen Hall: That’s remarkable. So essentially because you [00:12:00] used a basic henry Ford type process to, to create these foundations and to think about the problem differently. Not only can you deploy it, easier than a lot of things we’re doing right now on top of it, it works over a variety of depths and I think that’s a the hard thing for people to grasp because when we talk about offshore particularly start getting off the continental shelves here, you’re talking about.

More than a hundred meters typically of water. But you also have a, the gravity based system and the TLP system are all interconnected into the basic philosophy. can you explain like the, backbone of how that engineering works?

Gordon Jackson: It’s essentially, it’s, we’re using the same structural form in both, fixed and floating.

It’s basically, it’s two cylinders, one inside the other. A little bit of structure, which joins the two cylinders together. that’s it. 

Allen Hall: Gordon, you make it sound so simple, but the, [00:13:00]engineering is complicated to get to that point. And once you get to that level of, oh, that design actually works in a variety of depths, that opens up your customer base quite a bit.

Have you had inquiries from nearshore people? Or fixed bottom people thinking whoa, I could actually save myself a bunch of time and money, which is the real limiting factor on offshore wind at the moment. Are you starting to see some momentum there that, operators, developers are starting to rethink this problem and not just do what they did last week?

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Absolutely. one of the ways we came about the g you know, taking the ECO TLP and transforming it to the ECO GBS was, recommended by a client, was, that was their ask actions. That’s always the best way to start a product development cycle because, somebody’s interested.

and I think, and part of the reason I found Gordon to work with early on in our, the life of our company is, his background in, in GBS development. He did, he developed the Gravitas GBS [00:14:00] 10 years ago. So I think we, we got lucky that our, civil structural engineering partner with ARUP was, already really comfortable with, looking at this.

So I think that’s, part of, you always want the clients to be interested, before you start investing. You don’t wanna design a product that’s in your head or your, in your company lunchroom without a real ask for it. 

Allen Hall: And I, think also you have a, once you have the engineering pretty well done and.

Obviously do now you’re trying to touch a number of countries and every culture has its own way of, one of the construction business to do it slightly differently. South Korea does it different than Scotland, for example. You are working across cultures and trying to make the same design. apply to all those different areas.

Are, have you learned [00:15:00] some things from that? Is it, are you able to basically set the same assembly line in every place? or are there different, kinds of concrete, different kinds of access, different kinds of ports that you have to deal with? What are those variables there that, that change the way you do business?

Gordon Jackson: All the characteristics, ports are, obviously different. Really you just need space. And access to reasonably deep water from, that, from that space. And, it can get surprisingly difficult to find that, certainly in the UK and, in Northern Europe, people wanna build marines and, waterfront living, rather than having, an industrial facility, on the doorsteps.

In, developed countries it can be hard to find that space. But, in some, parts of the world, there’s lots of [00:16:00] space, available. some good port facilities that can be utilized. and then it’s just in, in all civil engineering works, you go to do the job, you go wherever the job is, you mobilize there.

You put in the systems, and equipment that you need to build, a structure, and then normally you go away at the end of the job, you hand it over to the client. you know what, what, would be good here is if we could set up some regional centers where you’ve done the, investment in the yard, and then you can, you can amortize those costs of development over a number of projects.

Then you should start to see, real, real good cost savings. 

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Just one thing, our footprint of our, cylinders is about a third of the footprint of a semi-sub, for example. [00:17:00] So, our footprint on the land port is very small. 

Allen Hall: I think that makes sense because if you watch the fixed bottom projects, particularly in the United States.

The first thing they had to do is rebuild the ports. The ports weren’t set for the scale and so they needed to expand the ports. That means you have to acquire land, you’ve gotta develop it. There’s a lot of processes involved. ’cause you’re talking about city, state, and federal government being involved.

Obviously federal in the United States is a problem. so just getting the port developed was a huge process for fixed bottom. You’re thinking about that differently though, because the reduced amount of space, the, you don’t have to be in a huge industrial area, but all obviously it would be nice, but you do run against that problem.

Are you thinking, when you talk about regional centers, are you thinking kind of Mediterranean, west Coast, us, Australia, one in Japan? How do you think about that problem? Because [00:18:00] once you get a site established, it does seem like because of the, how fast you can move these things around that it’ll become a pretty good job center for a lot of people.

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Yeah. There’s a long-term maintenance, crew that needs to be developed while we build these. Yeah, I think, it’s been a moving target of what’s really gonna develop in offshore wind. It’s like Lucy and Charlie Brown with football. I think we, constantly try to, get lined up to, to kick football and then it falls.

It’s more of the developers I, I feel for on that ’cause they’re these investing tremendous amount of money for these, development sites. We are open to any, we’ve been, we’ve looked at, some developers are looking at steel production and concrete production, two different reports servicing.

An array and we’re really flexible. It doesn’t, matter. When we first started on that Hawaii project, we were gonna do floating barges to slipform. [00:19:00]And we talked about that with ARUP. Some still this floating dock idea and submerging that dock. And it’s just a matter of finding the right, a large enough, dock for that type of, so then you’re not even using the land base port.

You’re learn, you’re using just to. Maybe a 400 foot frontage on the, along the port.

Allen Hall: That’s amazingly small, right? Because if you look at some of these ports right now that are doing, fixed bottom offshore, they’re massive, they’re huge sites. You’re talking about something roughly a 10th of the scale to get the same end result, which is turbines in the water.

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: For our part of it. We still, you still have the components and those are, that’s a, it’s another logistical challenge, and so I understand why the ports are. Looking at a lot more lay down space and things, maybe at a certain point these components are so large that they just stay on a vessel and they, and we take them off of a vessel directly and load them in.

Allen Hall: Yeah, I think that’s one of the considerations [00:20:00] is do you really tie it to land in, terms of needing a, massive amount of space, acres of space, thousands of square meters of space. Do you need that or is this, or can you do it much more efficiently because that overhead adds up over time. Not only are you trying to save on, the ships and the, especially the dedicated ships, you’re also looking at smaller footprints on shore and doing it a lot more economically.

What does that future look like now, because it does seem like we’re at a precipice where floating wind is no longer just being discussed. In theory, it’s, going to be implemented. What are those next steps here for ECO TLP? 

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: So next week we’re headed to Tokyo, to Japan for the wind expo. And, ARUP is also presenting at the Asia Wind Offshore Show.

I think we’re, we’re, good to learn. There’s just so much to learn about each culture, and I think this is something that, Gordon and I’ve talked about in terms of these international [00:21:00] projects, you’ve, gotta understand your culture that you’re moving into and you’ve gotta understand how to mediate across those different companies that come in.

Our company has seven different. Countries represented in our team. So right now, so, we’re, a US company, but we’re barely, we’re just by name, but I think most of our team members are not in the us and that’s international collaboration is something, I, really, loved working on it.

And I think, so when we go to Japan next week, it’s really mainly just to learn. we don’t. We have a lot to learn about Japan, and that’s what’s fun about each of these regions. 

Gordon Jackson: And that’s where we can help because, we’ve got a presence in Japan. We’ve been doing offshore wind in Japan, so we’re there, to help eight to ECO TLP with our, those little contacts and h do business, in Japan and things like that.[00:22:00]

We have a big international network, so you know, it can help. Some, in some areas, open some doors and, forge some, some friendships between, count companies. 

Allen Hall: Gordon you did a big project out in Perth, Australia, which is a difficult place, Australia is a very difficult place to manufacture things.

What are some of the lessons learned and what was that process like? 

Gordon Jackson: So he had a, client, a very small client who was prepared to. Seed responsibility for delivering his project to a, team, an alliance team. And he just, interviewed a number of teams and, we were lucky enough to be selected, as the team to deliver their project.

There was no tendering, it was just done on, how the, client felt about the, individuals that he met. And that, that was [00:23:00] very new to me. And, the whole project was delivered, by companies from the uk, from Australia, from Singapore, from be Netherlands, the Marine, the marine, vessels. A lot of ’em are coming from, from, Northern Europe, even though you’re in Australia. And, every company wants to do things differently and they all want to look after their interests, but the big thing about this alliance project was that, you were focused on one particular project and we were, we were coached and, facilitated, and trained to, to throw away our, our company affiliations and work together.

And, to collaborate together. And, [00:24:00] we’re all working towards the, end goal of delivering a particular product. And I think that’s, I think it’s got a lot of, lot of potential to be used in the offshore wind sector. This, was, an oil platform that we were gonna build on the, the northwest shelf of Australia, which happened to be built in concrete, because the client.

The client came to us with a notion of, doing something in concrete, which we, took his idea, decided we could do something a little bit cheaper and more straightforward and, went on to deliver it. We were given the opportunity to deliver it. And, yeah, I, it was my best project.

it was a tremendous experience for all the companies involved. And everyone made money so everyone’s happy. 

Allen Hall: That is difficult, right? You do see on these offshore projects, people coming from around the world to [00:25:00] work on this one big effort, a lot of money, and at times, thousands of people involved. Companies stu stumble there, obviously because you’re trying to tie cultures, you’re trying to tie companies together, but at the end of the day, you have to get this project done. Are, there some top level lessons learned from that of, how to bridge those differences? 

Gordon Jackson: I did another project, this was a steel project, where we had a US oil company.

And, The successful contractor was Hyundai in Korea. And they said to, me over the course of the project,

we always lose money with, with American oil companies. Why are we doing business with them? And it, all came down to the, the approach to the [00:26:00] contract.

Hyundai used to working in a more collaborative way with our clients. Whereas, this project, this is what the contract says, this is what you’ve taken on to do, there’s no negotiation, you’ll do it and that’s how much money you’re getting. And, but they find that very difficult.

And, it was at the time when they were opening up their business more internationally. And I think it was a big learning experience for them. Yeah I think a lot of the offshore wind tried to follow the same path and, yeah, I think more collaborative working is to be encouraged for me.

More talking to each other and negotiating rather than, imposing. 

Allen Hall: Where should developers go to find out more about ECO TLP? [00:27:00] Because you have a gravity based system. You got the tension leg platform, there’s a lot inside of the company. What’s the first stop? Should they visit your website?

Should they connect with you on LinkedIn? Where do they go? 

Nicole Johnson-Murphy: The LinkedIn where website is great. 

Allen Hall: So go visit ECO TLP. It’s ecotlp.com. Nicole and Gordon, this has been a great discussion. I’ve learned a lot. It’s very exciting because I think you’re on the precipice of something great. So thank you for joining me today.

Gordon Jackson: Thank you. Thank you.