REM: Crown Estate Scotland plans to offer new 6-GW leasing round

Crown Estate Scotland, the seabed landlord, plans to offer project rights for offshore wind farms to decarbonise oil and gas infrastructure in a new 6-GW-plus leasing round.

Bidding is expected to commence in June 2022, whereby developers can secure exclusivity agreements for seabed leases for their offshore wind farms.

For Targeted Oil and Gas Decarbonisation projects, these should not total more than 5.7 GW. For Innovation projects, they can be up to 500 MW overall. The latter might include cutting-edge technology such as green hydrogen.

Colin Palmer, director of marine for Crown Estate Scotland, said: “This leasing is about creating an opportunity for enhanced roll-out of offshore wind technology in Scottish waters. Whilst we recognise it will be for industry and government to take the key steps needed on oil and gas transition, we believe this will provide a step towards progressing that transition to net zero.” 

Ben Miller, senior policy manager at Scottish Renewables, responded to the news: “This announcement adds further momentum to the offshore wind sector in Scotland, and increases again the size of the supply chain opportunity ahead. Renewable energy must become the backbone of the net-zero emissions economy, so it’s encouraging to see that brownfield site decarbonisation will be prioritised in this process.”

He added: “We welcome the alignment with the ScotWind Leasing process in terms of supply chain, which should enable strong collaboration between projects to invest and support Scottish suppliers, and urge the Scottish government to ensure resources are in place across key bodies to deliver on this ambition.”

This process is separate to the ScotWind Leasing round for commercial scale offshore wind projects in Scottish waters, stressed Crown Estate Scotland.

Results for ScotWind were announced in January. In that round, the first in over a decade and the first since offshore leasing was devolved to Scotland, Crown Estate Scotland announced that 17 projects were selected out of a total of 74 applications.

A total of just under GBP700m ($949m) was to be paid by the successful applicants in option fees and passed to the Scottish government for public spending, said the agency.