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Owners of a mothballed Scottish port have unveiled plans to use it to recycle steel from disused oil rigs into offshore wind farm structures.
They intend to install a renewable-powered electric arc furnace at Ardersier Port (pictured) to handle scrap steel from former oil and gas structures in the North Sea.
Ardersier, near Inverness, is disused but was once among the world’s largest oil rig manufacturing yards at 162 hectares and with more than a kilometre of quayside.
New owners are about to begin work on a £20m, nine-month dredge of 2.5 million cubic metres of sand to enable the port to reopen.
Over the next five years they plan to construct an oil rig decommissioning facility, a £300m green steel plant powered by offshore wind and energy-from-waste (EfW) plant and facilities to manufacture foundation for wind turbines.
Dredging is due for completion next summer, when Ardersier Port will build a slipway to allow floating oil and gas structures to be hauled onshore prior to removing all contaminants and decommissioning them.
Port owners pointed to industry estimates that more than a million tonnes of North Sea infrastructure will be brought ashore this decade much of which can be recycled.
Co-owner Tony O’Sullivan said: “The energy transition from offshore structures to floating wind has an important missing factor: steel.
“Today, the UK exports ten million tonnes of scrap steel annually. By building a new renewable-powered electric arc furnace at Ardersier Port, the first new-build steel mill in the UK for 50 years, we will utilise a million tonnes of scrap each year.
“This will produce reinforcement steel for the UK construction industry, of which there is currently a shortfall, allow for the onsite construction of floating wind platforms, and enable us to export green steel to global markets.”
The other co-owner Steve Regan said: “At Ardersier we can lead the UK’s Green Industrial Revolution by using circular economy practices to deliver new low carbon infrastructure built on the by-products of our oil and gas past.”
Regan added: “It is a simple plan where each element makes commercial sense as a stand-alone project – but when combined, the benefits to the economy, and the environment, are multiplied.”
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