Why the hardest part of moving from E&P to offshore wind isn’t the geoscience
At a recent conference, a question came from the floor that I have been turning over since. What attributes and skills favour a transition from E&P geoscience to offshore wind?
As someone who works across both industries, I’ve always been interested in this question, and the answers that people give. Many answers seem framed around tools and techniques. This is where we are most comfortable expressing ourselves. In my experience that is not where the greatest challenge lies, however. My own career started off in E&P where I spent nearly fifteen years in exploration and production with major international operators, before I started working in offshore wind. Since then, I have built and led large teams of geoscientists in offshore wind, a good number of whom made the same crossover as I did. What follows are my observations of what that move actually involves, written in the hope that a curious geoscientist considering it might get there faster, or at least avoid some of the mistakes I was guilty of making.
Scale
The answer I hear most readily is “scale”. It’s real. Ask anyone who’s interpreted a 3D UHRS data set! But it’s a first-order observation. On a screen, a scale is a scalebar. In the real world uniformitarianism prevails. A Holocene fluvial system at ten metres is governed by the same dynamic processes as a Carboniferous one at three kilometres. Name scale, respect it, then move on to the more impactful differences, differences rooted in focus, objective and outcome.
Two Different Puzzles
In E&P, the geoscientist and the reservoir engineer are central to any project. Their overriding purpose is identification: prospect location, in-place volume, and how it can be most efficiently tested and/or produced. The science maps onto that purpose with unusual directness. The seismic waveform can be related straight to the objective, which is reservoir structure and fluid. Porosity, Vp/Vs and the rest of the quantitative interpretation toolkit all tie back to the same question. Around that core, the offshore infrastructure, the platform, the pipelines, the cables, the onshore terminals and the distribution network are important but arguably more directly quantifiable, especially once a project moves beyond exploration. They are largely engineering challenges with engineering answers. Major elements of a project’s upstream uncertainty sit within the subsurface.
Offshore wind is a different type of problem. It is a major infrastructure programme on a long timeline: capital-intensive, more distributed, and built from a large number of interdependent parts. The reservoir engineer isn’t here; the sedimentary geologist’s seat is largely taken by the engineering geologist or the geotechnical engineer. And the geoscience itself becomes a somewhat more abstract contribution. The reservoir geophysics and the quantitative relationships that served so well in E&P do not map directly onto cone tip resistance and small-strain shear modulus. The same base skill is now being used to define ground risk and suitability, not to quantify and extract a commodity. The transitioning E&P geoscientist doesn’t have to become a geotechnical engineer. This is a complex discipline in its own right, requiring years of specialist training. They do, however, need to understand what the geotechnical engineer needs well enough to have a seat at the table.
Meanwhile the things that sat out of our minds in oil and gas, or did not exist at all, are of huge concern: foundations, cables, consenting, grid connection, substations, and market mechanisms such as contracts for difference that decide whether a project is financeable in the first place. Each has its own discipline, and sub-disciplines, its own programme and its own constraints. The geoscientist works inside that framework. They are bound by it and constrained by it, and the work is judged more qualitatively on how well it serves the goals of the wider programme rather than on how elegant the interpretation is.
That is the shift. Same ground, same principles, same core skill. A different objective, a different place in the puzzle, and a less readily quantifiable definition of a positive outcome.
The Skill Set Comes with You
The move is not about acquiring a whole new technical skill set. Both industries demand a sophisticated, highly technical one, and the E&P geoscientist arrives with most of it already. Petroleum geoscience covers tectonics, stratigraphy, sedimentology, reservoir geophysics and a great deal more, and nearly all of it is relevant to the shallow section. Areas for upskilling during crossover include survey scoping and the use of seabed and shallow subsurface sensors such as multibeam, sidescan and sub-bottom profiler.
Attributes of a Successful Transition
In those I have seen convert most smoothly, two things stand out above the rest. The first is context. While holding on to the fundamental principles of rigorous scientific investigation, they have taken the time to understand the big picture, not just their corner of it: how the interconnected pieces fit together, what the linkages are, how one element drives or blocks another, and most importantly, where they themselves fit into it. They can step out of the micro of the technical work and evaluate the macro of the project. That context is what allows a geoscientist to pull a specific lever at the right moment, rather than simply produce more data.
That context is also what makes Objective-Led Site Characterisation possible. Once you understand the drivers of the wider programme well enough to know which piece of the puzzle the geoscience must serve, and which it can bypass, you can work out the Minimum Effective Dose of investigation or evaluation required to get there. Not simply everything that can be measured, but what the decision in front of the project actually needs. That judgement is only available to someone who can see the whole picture.
The second is working culture. The E&P geoscientist sits in the centre of the Venn diagram, and also at the start of any project. In offshore wind, the same cannot be said. Geoscience is one input among many on a schedule-driven, commercially exposed programme. A shift from being the answer to becoming a contributor, often at someone else’s pace, is one each person must emotionally resolve.
Back to the Question
So, what does it take for an E&P geoscientist to convert to offshore wind? Maybe less than some fear, and probably in a different direction too. The science comes with you. What changes is what success looks like, and that’s the part no one teaches you.
Vanrisch McLean is the founder of Agerion, an independent geoscience and ground risk advisory. He spent nearly fifteen years in oil and gas exploration and production before moving into offshore wind, where he has led site characterisation on fixed and floating projects in the UK, Europe, Asia and beyond for almost a decade.