New Projects in the Offshore Ravenna

There are several projects for the production of energy from renewable sources to which the companies associated with Roca look with great interest, ready to make available their decades of experience in oil & gas internationally.
The capture of CO2. Eni’s project for the capture and storage of CO2 is moving forward quickly. Within the next year, and downstream of the necessary authorizations, the construction of the demonstration phase will be started through the positioning of two plants for the capture and subsequent storage of 25 thousand tons of carbon dioxide taken from the Casal Borsetti thermal plant and 40 thousand from the butadiene boiler at Versalis. Through the existing subsea pipelines, the CO2 will be sent to the ‘depleted’ field using the Porto Corsini Mare Ovest platform.
The two plants will serve to calibrate the use of capture technologies for a subsequent application on an industrial scale that will see Ravenna as a pole for the production of energy from carbon dioxide, up to an initial capacity of 4 million tons of CO2. captured and stored annually. The overall containment capacity of unused gas fields in the Ravenna offshore has been estimated at between 300-500 million tons. The investment planned by Eni is around 2 billion euros.
The director of Eni’s CCUS & Forestry and president of Assorisorse, Luigi Ciarrocchi, explained to the press at the end of July that “we are certainly talking about a great opportunity for regeneration and enhancement of the Ravenna district, strategic for Eni, where it will be possible to carry out an economic project circular, in synergy with existing infrastructures. The requalification and reuse of a part of existing assets will allow a quick process, without any occupation of new spaces and therefore without any burden for the territory. The project will also have important positive effects on the employment front: it will enhance the local supply chain and the specific skills acquired over the years and internationally recognized and will promote the development of new ones, thanks to the high technological content of the capture and storage “.
Wind power plant. Saipem Agnes will participate in the development of a wind farm in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Ravenna. Saipem thus confirms its increasingly active presence in the field of initiatives related to the development of offshore wind and certifies its presence in the sector also in Italy. To this end, it has recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with AGNES (www.agneswindpower.com), a ROCA associated company, for the development of renewable energy in the Adriatic Sea that deals with offshore and nearshore wind, floating solar at sea, storage systems energy, production of hydrogen from renewable sources, and QINT’X (www.quintx.com), an Italian company specializing in the renewable energy sector, in particular photovoltaic, wind, hydroelectric and e-mobility (electric vehicles).
The project, with an investment of 600 million euros, involves the installation of about 56 turbines on fixed foundations on the seabed in two different sites, the first over 8 nautical miles, the second over 12 miles. The total installed power will be approximately 450MW. Furthermore, as part of the same project, it is planned to use innovative technologies such as floating solar photovoltaic through the proprietary technology of Moss Maritime, part of Saipem’s XSIGHT division dedicated to the development of innovative solutions to speed up the decarbonisation process of the sector of power. In this regard, the XSIGHT division has already started the development of integrated solutions aimed at the use of renewable energy and the production of “Green” hydrogen and the Agnes project will be the first project where these integrated solutions will take shape, giving the possibility to find an alternative solution to the decommissioning of the O&G platforms present in the Adriatic Sea.
The project will be located in an area with a high industrial vocation and will involve the local supply chain to support the project itself.
Mauro Piasere, Chief Operating Officer of the XSIGHT Division, commented: “For some time now, Saipem has embarked on a path to strengthen its presence in the renewable energy sector. In particular, through the XSIGHT division, the new role of the company as developer of offshore wind farms is being defined and the Memorandum of Understanding signed with AGNES and QINT’X constitutes a new important opportunity in this direction. The agreement is part of the new business model adopted by the company, increasingly protagonist of the energy transition, and inaugurated in 2019 by the agreement with Plambeck for the development of wind farms with floating foundations off the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. . Through the XSIGHT division, Saipem intends to launch a similar project also in Sicily and Sardinia, through the use of floating foundations for wind power, thus favoring the Italian shipbuilding industry “.
Alberto Bernabini, Chief Executive Officer of QINT’X, commented: “The signing of this agreement is another concrete step towards the realization of an ambitious project born two years ago. Our vision is to create an innovative energy hub in the Upper Adriatic by integrating different technologies to generate clean energy from wind, sun and hydrogen. We are proud to be able to count on Saipem as a partner, a leading global company in Offshore solutions, now more than ever projected to become the protagonist of the energy transition. This collaboration will make it possible to exploit great synergies between the two companies and thus transform the Agnes project into reality ”.
The wave motion. Eni’s project for the production of wave energy, is called Iswec, and was presented at OMC2019. The development of the prototype is underway off the coast of Ravenna.
“Wave energy has a perspective especially in a country like Italy, which is a peninsula. We have already made an industrial prototype and we have a project to develop about 12 mega watts with 118 boats. It will be developed over the next few years and is also part of the project that we presented to the government on the Recovery Fund ”.
The project is called Iswek (Inertial Sea Wave Energy Converter). Thus Eni’s CEO, Claudio Descalzi at the inauguration of the Energie dal Mare Research Center, created by the Turin Polytechnic in collaboration with Eni.
“It is a project – explained Descalzi – that is suitable for the Recovery Fund because it is linked to decarbonization, the creation of energy, a completely clean energy, and also the creation of jobs in collaboration with the university to continuously improve the performance and efficiency of these technologies. This is our goal ”.

In addition to these projects, of which many details are known, other studies are underway regarding blue and green hydrogen. The EU has assigned this energy vector a leading role in its strategic project of transition towards an economy with zero environmental impact by 2050. The obstacles are not lacking, but the world of research is committed to overcoming them.