BIO-UV Group Reports Robust Growth for Bio-Sea Ballast Water Treatment Systems
French water treatment specialist BIO-UV Group has reported a 38% growth in BIO-SEA ballast water treatment system sales in the first half of the year, compared to the same period 2021.
Despite a year impacted by various geopolitical factors, the publicly listed company sold more than 100 BIO-SEA BWTS units in the first six months of the year. Demand is forecast to “remain very high” throughout the year, continuing into 2024.
The company reported half year revenues across the group’s maritime activities of €9.51M, with a current orderbook valued at €5.1M.
Commenting on the robust results, Benoît Gillmann, Founder, Chairman and CEO of BIO-UV Group, said: "In the current context affected by all kinds of tensions and inflation, BIO-UV Group's performance in the first half of 2022 is remarkable. Once again, I would like to thank the Group's teams who delivered an excellent performance with very solid fundamentals.
“We continue to make progress in our maritime business development strategy. With increasing temperatures and climate change likely to result in further changes to the marine eco system, an effective and properly maintained ballast water treatment remains a vital priority for the global shipping fleet. BIO-UV Group will continue to deliver relevant and competitive solutions to ensure shipowners are equipped with the best UV water treatment technology available.”
Last year, the BIO-UV Group introduced a new M-Series BIO-SEA ballast water treatment system for flow rates up to 2100m3/h, and earlier this year announced it now has the capability to offer complete turnkey BWTS services.
The company has ballast water treatment units for flow rates from 13m3/h up to 2100m3/h installed on a wide range of vessel types, including containerships, bulk carriers, multi-cargo vessels, cruiseships, passenger ferries, offshore vessels, naval ships and mega-yachts.
Job advert: R&D Engineers – Aquatec
Through-water communications and subsea integrity specialist Aquatec is looking for three talented R&D Engineers to join its award-winning team.
Engineers at Aquatec develop and maintain cutting-edge subsea electronic instrumentation and communications systems that address real-world needs in ocean science, marine bioacoustics, sediment monitoring, and offshore energy.
As an R&D Engineer, you will be directly involved in instrument conception, definition, design, manufacture, testing, and integration into larger systems. Field commissioning, customer support, and training add to the variety. Flexibility, enthusiasm for continuous learning and team spirit are essential.
Positions:
- R&D Electronics Project Engineer
- R&D Software Engineer
- R&D Embedded Firmware Engineer
What we offer:
- Full time, 37.5hrs per week
- Competitive salary and holiday
- Life Assurance
- Private Medical Insurance
- Profit share scheme
- Spacious headquarters site
The ideal candidates will:
- Have a track record of bringing designs successfully to fruition
- Be prepared to travel within the UK and beyond if required
- Be open to commissioning and installing Aquatec products at customer sites, including offshore
- Undertake short duration sea trials when required
Full details, essential skills and experience needed, and information on how to apply can be found at: https://www.aquatecgroup.com/about-us/careers
New Batch of C-Vision Encrypt Systems Supplied to Asian Navy
C-Tecnics, Aberdeen-based subsea video systems manufacturer, have just supplied a batch of ten brand-new C-Vision Encrypt portable video and communications sets to a Navy based in southern Asia.
The project, administered by one of their trusted distributors, saw their team of technicians work tirelessly to meet a strict deadline while maintaining their highest level of quality.
Scott Younger, Technical Manager of C-Tecnics, stated, “it’s excellent. A great order for us. The ‘Encrypt’ was designed specifically for this type of dive team and we are all pleased that they chose to invest in our product. Time was against us, but we knew we were capable. Our skilled staff put in the work and cut no corners. This opportunity to support yet another international Navy with our products was one we couldn’t turn down”.
Within the scope was to supply ten complete C-Vision Encrypt sets which included the C-Vision topside video and communications console. The C-Vision is a highly portable, PC-based video and communications recording system. This unique Encrypt model is equipped with file encryption software which ensures that all recordings within the system are secured by AES-256 (256 bit) encryption and only accessible by way of an encryption key. Further enhancements include a 4-wire, or full round robin, communications system and hard-wearing MILSPEC connectors which are built to last. Also included in the scope were underwater cameras, lights, various mounts, portable power packs to support remote operations, and cable deployment reels.
The Encrypt is being used by a number of Navy dive teams worldwide and has been recognised and coded for classification by NATO.
KW Group Ltd – ASME Certification Authorisation
The engineering team at KW Group Ltd have proudly received the ASME (The American Society of Mechanical Engineers) Mark.
The mark is recognition that our certified quality assurance program for the U2 and U3 Pressure Vessels has followed all aspects of the applicable ASME Code or Standard and met the rigorous requirements of ASME’s Conformity Assessment Certification program.
This is a fantastic achievement, successfully becoming just one of six pressure vessel companies in the UK with a Division 2, U2 stamp, but also the only Division 3, U3 stamp high pressure vessel company in the UK, with only 46 globally!
KW’s engineers equipped with their extensive skills and knowledge have been rewarded, having followed the key steps to comply with ASME certification, which included navigating through a lengthy, intensively thorough preparation, application, assessment and authorisation process.
The ASME review team spent a number of days onsite at KW’s premises, scrutinising quality management processes in detail, ensuring that the implementation of the ASME code in full and checking that we produce the highest quality pressure vessels in strict accordance with the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code.
As part of the Joint Review, the ASME team also witnessed a successful hydrostatic pressure test on our demonstration item at 1250 bar, carried out in their purpose built environmental and pressure testing facility.
Now relishing the challenge of implementing all the things that have been learned in the process as an evaluated and approved ASME certified company. The engineers are now building the first production pressure vessels to the code, using the ASME stamp to demonstrate their commitment to both safety and quality.
Any pressure vessel stamped with the ASME Single Certification Mark will have been built strictly in accordance with the provisions of the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code.
KW provide customers with a vital service, ensuring their pressure testing systems provide the safest working environment, taking the wellbeing of their customers extremely seriously, adhering to the exacting international standards. This certification opens up a huge opportunity for KW to be able to supply ASME U stamped pressure vessels to Division 2 and 3 to the United States of America and Canada.
The team continuously focuses on improvement and supporting high pressure testing requirements designed for complex challenging applications globally.
Russell Bannerman CEng MIMechE, Engineering Manager. “ASME Certification has been a huge but incredibly satisfying challenge. I’m incredibly proud of the team to have demonstrated our complete commitment to quality and to have that recognised independently by ASME.”
BIRNS Introduces New Interactive Ecommerce Site for BIRNS Millennium™ Connector Kits
BIRNS, Inc. has announced a new enhanced capability website that will allow customers worldwide to directly and quickly specify and order BIRNS Millennium™ connector kits online. The company has made significant site design investments, making the experience educational and intuitive, and providing tools that give a clear, swift path to selecting what is needed for a specific requirement. In addition to connector kits, the new site includes related high- and low-pressure caps, mounting nuts, O-rings and installation tools, along with associated wiring worksheets and downloadable configuration drawings.
“This exciting new ecommerce capability will provide around the clock support and access to our customers, along with invaluable, easily navigable product information that will make the buying decision seamless,” said Bruce Meredith, Technical Sales Manager for BIRNS. “We believe that this will continue to set BIRNS connectors apart in terms of comprehensive technical information, ease of purchase and particularly in lead times.”
BIRNS introduced ABS Product Design Assessment (PDA) certified NPT penetrators via ecommerce last year, and shares that custom orders and cable assemblies will still be ordered directly through the BIRNS sales department.
Jason Barfield Joins Teledyne Marine’s Americas Sales Team
Teledyne Marine is pleased to announce that Jason Barfield has joined the organization in the role of Technical Sales Manager for Teledyne Marine’s Instruments and Imaging technology verticals. Based out of Texas, Jason’s focus will be on serving customers in the offshore energy sector throughout North America, South America, and Canada.
Jason began his career at Trelleborg Offshore US, where he served in progressive roles, including operations manager, project manager, and sales manager. Jason will apply his experience, industry knowledge and talents to serve Teledyne Marine’s growing customer base engaged in offshore oil, gas, and renewable energy applications.
Jamie Carrig, Vice President Business Development shares: “We’re very excited to welcome Jason to the Teledyne Marine team. Jason will be focused on supporting our offshore energy customers to ensure they get optimized solutions and support from our industry leading range of our Marine Instrumentation and Imaging products. We are very confident in his ability to succeed in this role and look forward to continuing to strengthen our customer relationships.”
Jason Barfield adds: “I’m excited to join a global leader in the marine market and look forward to working with our customers to solve their toughest challenges.”
Network Rail Environmental Monitoring Install - Reedham Bridge
UK based, Environmental Monitoring specialists, OceanWise Ltd have been selected to deliver a project with Network Rail which involves installing environmental monitoring equipment, and delivering ongoing accurate realtime tide and wave data, to support operational decision making and improve safety at their Reedham Bridge site.
The historic Reedham Bridge based in Norfolk is a swing bridge which crosses the river Ware near to Reedham railway station. Originally commissioned by Sir Samuel Morton Peto in the 1840s is operated from the 1904 Reedham Swing Bridge signal box and carries the railway line between Norwich and Lowestoft.
Ralph Bostock, Monitoring Business Manager comments: “The ongoing development of marine environmental monitoring has led to many exciting new challenges for OceanWise. Working with Network Rail is a perfect
opportunity for us as it not only allows us to further develop our expertise with a new customer, it also allows us to deploy our systems and services in a new type of marine environment.”
Seabed 2030 Enters New Partnership with Terradepth in a Collaboration That Will Boost Project’s Crowdsourcing Initiatives
Terradepth and The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 project have announced a new partnership which will utilize Terradepth's geospatial data portal known as Absolute Ocean. Seabed 2030 will use Absolute Ocean as a data visualization and exploration tool as part of the international effort to map the entire ocean floor. The announcement was made on the heels of the 2022 United Nations Ocean Conference in Lisbon, Portugal.
Seabed 2030 is a collaborative project between The Nippon Foundation in Japan and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) with the mission of inspiring 100% mapping of the ocean floor and making it freely available to all by 2030. GEBCO is a joint program of the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC-UNESCO). Seabed 2030 comprises five Data Centers – four Regional Centers and one Global Center – which are responsible for coordinating and assembling mapping data.
In addition to producing and delivering global GEBCO products, the Seabed 2030 Global Center is also a Trusted Node for receipt of citizen-sourced data in support of IHO’s Crowdsourced Bathymetry (CSB) initiative which encourages government, academic and privately owned vessels, including superyachts and fishing boats, to participate in increasing our knowledge of the ocean by sharing depth measurements from navigation instruments.
Terradepth’s Absolute Ocean portal will provide Seabed 2030 with a secure platform to allow data contributors to visualize their contributions in an interactive way and explore how they relate to other open-source data in the platform.
“Our Absolute Ocean platform will enable Seabed 2030 to expand their ocean data management and outreach efforts to a global audience of explorers, researchers, educators, and ocean enthusiasts, without requiring subject matter expertise to explore or interpret the data” said Jason Schwartz, Terradepth Vice President of Corporate Development.
Seabed 2030 will process CSB data for onward contribution to IHO’s Data Center for Digital Bathymetry (DCDB). Seabed 2030’s recent partnership with the International SeaKeepers Society will provide some of the first potential users of the platform with custom data loggers being operated by ocean-going vessels to capture georeferenced bathymetric points during their travels.
“Our partnership with Terradepth will greatly enhance the work we do to support IHO’s CSB initiative, which is a fundamental strand of Seabed 2030’s mission,” commented Dr Helen Snaith, Head of Seabed 2030’s Global Center. “The Global Center are excited to use the Absolute Ocean platform as an invaluable tool bringing us one step closer to completing the puzzle of the world’s seabed.”
Absolute Ocean is a browser-based portal for the storage, discovery, and sharing of Trusted Node data as well as data collected by other third parties. Terradepth developed Absolute Ocean as a cloud-based ocean information management platform where layers of marine data can be studied using the power of Machine Learning technology. Powerful visualization and analysis functions allow users to examine seafloor data in 2D and 3D from a variety of perspectives, scales, and time periods, increasing operational efficiency and the quality control process.
“For applications spanning environmental monitoring, coastal development, and offshore energy production, Absolute Ocean gives stakeholders across organizations the tools necessary to make sense of their associated underwater environments,” said Terradepth’s Schwartz.
Terradepth will roll out the commercial version of Absolute Ocean in summer 2022 with multiple subscription levels. Clients will be able to load their own geospatial marine data sets onto the secure platform as well as access the thousands of ocean data files currently included in the platform database – side-scan sonar, synthetic aperture sonar, multibeam bathymetry, satellite-derived bathymetry, LiDAR, sub-bottom profiles, magnetometer readings, and satellite imagery.
Absolute Ocean also serves as the data delivery platform for the geophysical and hydrographic survey solutions Terradepth offers to a rapidly growing client base in the Environmental, Telecommunications, Construction, Energy, and Maritime industries. To capture seafloor data for these commercial clients, Terradepth operates a fleet of Autonomous Undersea Vehicles (AUVs), which can be configured with multiple sensors for seabed site verification, pre-construction surveys, pipeline/cable inspection, dredging/trenching support, habitat mapping, mineral exploration, hazard identification, and unexploded munitions detection.
Global Underwater Hub to grasp “greatest opportunity for subsea in our generation”
Subsea Capability Crucial to UK Capitalising on Floating Offshore Wind
The Global Underwater Hub (GUH) says floating offshore wind represents the greatest opportunity for the £8billion subsea industry in the UK this generation and must not be missed.
The new strategic, intelligence-led organisation, set up to transform the UK’s underwater industry into one of the largest and fastest-growing industries in the country, is building a robust case for government to support the industry as an enabler with the greatest potential to deliver UK capability that will place the UK at the forefront of floating offshore wind.
Through the UK Government’s Floating Offshore Wind Manufacturing Investment Scheme (FLOWMIS), up to £160 million will be made available to scale-up the deployment of floating offshore wind and to invest in key areas where the UK has competitive advantage.
Chief executive of GUH, Neil Gordon, said: “With our world-leading status and marketshare, the subsea industry clearly has competitive advantage. The underwater elements of manufacturing, assembling, installing and then operating and maintaining floating offshore wind projects are eminently transferable from offshore oil and gas, where subsea expertise was, largely, honed and refined.
“From floating foundations to mooring and anchoring systems, as well as dynamic power cables, the subsea industry will be integral to delivering floating wind. And it’s not just these largescale fabrication and manufacturing elements, it’s also all the skills and technologies, components and sub-components which will be required further down the line and which we have in abundance in the UK.”
GUH is working closely with government agencies to identify the key areas of expertise and technology in which it should invest.
Mr Gordon added: “It’s crucial that the UK and Scottish governments know how to support the industrial investment required to ensure the UK supply chain meets the ambition and pledges made by the successful bidders in Scotwind and the upcoming INTOG (Innovation and Targeted Oil & Gas) seabed leasing round.”
GUH has called on the underwater industry to participate in the UK Government’s Request for Information, which closes on the 15th of July. Determined the country doesn’t lose out as it did with fixed offshore wind, the UK Government has issued the request to port developers, floating wind foundation designers and fabricators, component and sub-component manufacturers, floating offshore wind developers and EPCI contractors. The responses will inform government of both the opportunities available and the capabilities and capacity in the supply chain and allow them to gauge where investment can have the biggest impact.
The British Energy Security Strategy’s ambition to deliver up to 50GW of power from offshore wind by 2030 includes 5GW of floating wind, which is anticipated to rapidly increase beyond then.
“By becoming a first-mover in floating offshore wind at scale, the UK will be well-placed to capitalise on the plethora of floating wind projects that will swiftly follow around the globe,” said Mr Gordon.
“The scale of what is planned in UK waters, through Scotwind, is unprecedented and signals one of the biggest industrial opportunities for decades.”
Crown Estate Scotland outlined almost £25billion of planned investment into the Scottish economy across ScotWind projects. The total financial investment in the supply chain across these projects is £66 billion, of which £25 billion is ring-fenced to be spent in Scotland. Eleven of the 17 projects will be using floating wind turbines and almost 80% of the £25 billion invested in Scotland will be dedicated to floating wind.
“And this is before we factor in INTOG, which will attract bidders to apply for the rights to build offshore windfarms for the purpose of decarbonising oil and gas production in the North Sea by providing clean, green energy to electrify platforms,” said Mr Gordon. “It is anticipated that, due to the urgency in meeting North Sea Transition Deal targets, INTOG projects could get underway first and pave the way for Scotwind projects.”
Another major task for GUH is making sure that the underwater industry has visibility of these projects and to facilitate relationships between them and the developers leading on these.
“But we’re not just a go-between, GUH will be the go-to organisation, not only for subsea companies looking to capitalise on the opportunity but also for government in terms of knowing where and when to invest in order to build out capability and capacity and accelerate the massive scale-up that will be required to take full advantage of the biggest industrial opportunity in the North Sea in decades.”
TDI-Brooks Adds Rich Hendren Ph.D To The Executive Leadership Team
Rich retired from the U.S. Navy after over 30 years of service in submarines, submarine support, and shore installation management. Transitioning to civilian life, he gained additional management experience in the professional training, maritime, petroleum, and hydrographic survey industries where he built a history of leading teams to success in complex operations often in challenging environments. His strong background in operations, process control, safety, security, and quality management will help us meet the challenges of flawless operations.
Rich may be reached via his email [email protected]
