The ambition of SBM Offshore is to join the boat challenge minimising the environmental footprint of this activity by implementing innovative and affordable solutions. These solutions are inspired by a multifactorial interpretation of green design, which unfolds along the axes of circular economy, sustainability of materials and efficient use of energy. The concept of “reuse” is central, and the majority of our components can have several potential future lives after this venture, before recycling. Nonetheless, we decided to move beyond, validating the paradigms of “repurposing” and “upcycling”, more broadly. Whereas these typically concern a simpler new use of an existing object, we wanted to demonstrate that a) ennobling the use of an object is possible without fundamental modifications, and b) this can happen in highly technological applications.
As a result, the structure of the cockpit is entirely made of aluminium, and more than half of the mass of its structural components comes from straightforward reuse and repurpose, as explained further in section 4. Coherently, the whole propulsion system consists of standard components that can be reused, in full or in part, in a variety of applications, whether industrial (e.g. telemetry for SBM’s buoys) or not (e.g. solar installations, internet of things).
However, as a distinctive initiative to satisfy our green commitment fully, SBM Offshore decided to think beyond the boundaries of the event itself and extend the concept of sustainability to the whole energy chain, by ensuring that the H2 needed to fuel the boat originates from renewable sources. Accordingly, in the context of a company-wide development of new renewable energies solutions, we decided to design a prototype floating system that would allow producing H2 from demineralized water in a short term and directly from sea water in a second phase of development, using sun and wind power. That, in a future perspective, would allow exploring efficient means of energy storage to combine with the existing SBM floating offshore wind solutions.