bp and EnBW have been awarded a lease option off the east coast of Scotland to develop a major offshore wind project — to be known as Morven. The award was made in the highly competitive ScotWind leasing round, the results of which were announced by Crown Estate Scotland today.
The approximately 860km2 lease is located around 60km off the coast of Aberdeen. The E1 lease is in an advantaged area, allowing the partners to develop it as a fixed-bottom offshore wind project with a total generating capacity of around 2.9 gigawatts (GW), sufficient to power more than three million homes.
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The success of the bid is expected to unlock a number of investments across the country, as part of bp’s integrated energy company approach, leveraging its existing North Sea infrastructure, skills and relationships and EnBW’s experience in offshore wind. Along with the offshore wind development, these investments include significant expansion of electric vehicle charging infrastructure in Scotland and green hydrogen production. Together, these represent up to £10 billion of investment in support of offshore wind and Scotland’s energy transition.
bp chief executive Bernard Looney said: “bp has a proud 100-year history in Scotland. We want to thank Crown Estate Scotland for the opportunity to now start a new chapter, helping Scotland continue as a global energy leader for the next 100 years. We have a fantastic partner in EnBW and now an even more competitive portfolio of nearly 6GW of combined offshore wind to develop together.
“Our plans go much further than just the turbines offshore. They see us investing in projects and in people — from EV charging to green hydrogen — aligned with Scotland’s energy transition plans. “This is good business — making disciplined investments and demonstrating what an integrated energy company can do; we can’t wait to get to work.”
EnBW CEO Frank Mastiaux added: “In this close partnership we succeeded in a highly competitive field of bidders. Since the construction of the first German offshore wind farm in 2010 by EnBW, we have become a major player in offshore technology, even beyond Germany’s borders. We are therefore very pleased to be able to contribute our experience of developing and operating technically demanding offshore wind projects once again with our partner bp.
“This success marks so far the largest development project in offshore wind for our company. And we are proud to contribute significantly to a climate-friendly energy future in Scotland, being one of the world’s largest market for offshore wind power. “For EnBW this investment will be a corner stone in our strategy to become CO2 neutral by 2035. The international and European targets to reduce the CO2-footprint can only be met by implementing large scale renewable generation capacity. Offshore Wind in Scotland provides a perfect setting for achieving this goal.”
As a result of the successful ScotWind bid, the partners will establish their operational centre in Scotland, and bp will make Aberdeen its global operations and maintenance centre of excellence for offshore wind, creating up to 120 new direct jobs. It is expected to contribute up to £40 million per year to the economy.
