Raising the bar offshore

AXTECH I PROFILE

RAISING

THE BAR OFFSHORE

Norway’s AXTech AS is a specialist designer and engineer of offshore heavy lifting and handling equipment. Through strategic alliances with some of the world’s biggest and best fabricators, the company is able to offer its clients unique solutions for the toughest and most challenging scenarios. CEO and Technical Director at AXTech, Richard Myhre, spoke to Richard Hagan about what it takes to win the battle against the elements offshore.

Established by current CEO and Technical Director Richard Myhre and a partner in 2004, the decision to create AXTech AS came on the back of the lessons the pair learnt from a previous company they’d owned, which had been through a series of acquisitions. Ultimately, the two felt that they’d been left with too little decision-making power and thus decided to leave and effectively, start again. It has proven to be a shrewd move to say the least.

Today, AXTech AS is majority-owned by Mr Myhre and his business partner, while several minority shareholders (who share the pair’s vision), are also part of the ownership mix. The company is agile and designed to allow its management the flexibility to make the right decisions for its future.

“We’re now in a phase in which we’re quite ambitious about what we can do in the future, and we’re looking at what ownership structures will suit us best for future opportunities,” Mr Myhre noted. “We continue to have a dynamic approach to decisions around what is best for the company.”

That approach has led the company to a decision to focus on its engineering expertise whilst leaving the heavy lifting of fabrication to strategically selected alliance partners.

Production strategy

“Currently, we’re just less than 50 people working in our headquarters in Norway and then we have an additional 25 engineers spread across three facilities in Poland. These offices focus on

AXTECH I PROFILE

design work and of those, one specialises in numerical calculations. All three are fully integrated into our workflow from head office,” said Mr Myhre.

Equipment fabrication is carefully outsourced and project-managed by AXTech’s teams, as Mr Myhre explained: “Until a few months ago, we had a shareholding in a local fabrication facility, but we sold it off as we couldn’t foresee the need for any equipment within Norway. Instead, we perform fabrications through alliances in the region.”

Due to the size and weight of the equipment in the company’s portfolio, it’s more practical to have the equipment manufactured as near as possible to the quayside at which it is required or to the site at which it must be installed. This adjusted approach also suits AXTech’s green agenda, minimising transport and therefore carbon emissions, and also benefits the client by way of lower transport costs.

Project managing fabrication of the large, heavy and complex machinery designed by AXTech, requires the special management skills and industry knowledge within the company’s fabrication department.

“The first step is to understand the production facility we’ll be using for any given project, in relation to how we are designing the equipment for that project,” Mr Myhre detailed. “We try to look at how a particular design can be made to best suit that particular facility.

“Next, we look at the logistics involved in getting the machine between fabrication facilities and the end site. Then, we look at what personnel are involved and we ensure that we understand what material they’ll be using. This is all to ensure that the equipment is fabricated in the best possible way.”

Remote management

AXTech has developed various methods of carrying out site surveys at its alliance fabricators.

Once these on-site checks are completed, AXTech then uses remote evaluation software to remotely test and check equipment, utilising high-res on-site cameras to check any aspect of the equipment’s manufacture, at any time.

“Body cameras are even worn by production staff so that we can check, for example, exactly what the person’s hands are doing,” revealed Mr Myhre. “Finally, we use instant chat facilities with direct software connections to the production site, so we can press a button and immediately talk to the team onsite in, say, China. All of this also allows the client to be much more involved with the project no matter where they are situated on earth.”

Pivoting into renewables

As a designer and producer of specialist heavy-lift and heavyweight handling equipment, AXTech has a broad market of potential customers, but the opportunity that most interests the company right now is the one that exists in the booming offshore wind farm market.

“We’re progressing very well into offshore renewables,” confirmed the CEO. “Our key focus has always been heavy lifting solutions at sea, and we’ve been successful with that, but our key interest now is to look at becoming involved with those big wind turbines that must be installed and maintained.

“When there’s a need for the combination of heavy weight to be handled, and in a demanding environment, that’s where we are the most comfortable with the technology base that we have.”

The renewables market is proving to have some of its own unique challenges for a company that has traditionally been in the market for building one-off custom solutions.

“In our usual markets of oil and gas, we would move from project to project, with each being unique and requiring its own specific solutions,” said Mr Myhre. “In offshore renewables it’s different. For example, one site will need 100 turbines, and there’ll be another 100 at the next, so the logistics become

TWIFLEX LIMITED

The unique demands of Axtech’s specialist winch application demanded an entirely bespoke torque limiting solution from the Wichita brand of Twiflex Limited, in the UK.

A spring applied clutch, incorporating sintered friction linings, provides high torque density with variable torque setting. Internal temperature sensors monitor slip events to optimise clutch performance.

editorial mention

AXTECH I PROFILE

much more demanding and challenging; you’re taking that one design and multiplying it by 100. That means that if there’s an error with that one design, it can become multiplied by 100.”

To combat the challenges, AXTech’s engineering for this market needs to be even more efficient.

“It’s a different task and mentality because obviously the risk becomes higher, and you aren’t able to tolerate errors in the same way,” he said. “You must hit the optimal design as fast and efficiently as possible, and then fabricate it competitively whilst still meeting our ‘green profile’ credentials in terms of minimising carbon emissions and long transits.”

AXTech’s main focus currently, confirmed Mr Myhre, is on the installation of these huge structures. The company is attentively working on answers to numerous questions posed by the demands associated with working in the sector.

The CEO listed a number of these questions: “How do you handle thousands of tonnes in open sea? How do you handle, guide and compensate it? A monopile weighs 3,000 tonnes; how do you safely handle that on deck? How do you lift it? How do you grab it?

“We want to look at how to handle these various big structures. We’ve got some experience with this already. We recently delivered a significant project to Belgium’s DEME in which we delivered reels for handling a vertical offshore foundation drilling machine.”

Small company, big skills

According to Mr Myhre, AXTech is excited about solving the heavy lift and handling problems of the booming offshore renewable energy market because it’s an opportunity for the company to prove its credentials to the market – despite its comparatively small size.

“We are a very small company but we believe in the skills that we have. We’ll be looking at what alliances we need to be a serious player in the market and at what investments are required to develop our tools to the fullest extent. And in general, we’ll be reviewing what infrastructure a company needs to have to be competitive in the future.”

AXTech isn’t one to shy away from a challenge. The renewables market has many, but there is one that has really grabbed the company’s attention:

“We see floating wind installations are coming – it will no longer just be bottom-fixed,” Mr Myhre predicted. “Our ambitions and aims for this particular segment of the offshore wind market is to address the technical challenges that have principally not yet been solved by the industry. For example, how do you lift and handle big objects when it’s not just the vessel moving but also the object? And how do you swap wind blades when you arrive at the turbine with a floating vessel?

“There’s a bright future for anyone who manages to ‘crack those nuts’. If we solve some of these technical challenges for floating wind energy installations, then it’ll be important for the future,” concluded Mr Myhre. n