Fugro’s vessel Fugro Pioneer left the Port of Sunderland in the UK to kick off a 6-month offshore site investigation and survey campaign for innogy’s 1.4GW Sofia offshore wind farm, which is located 195 km off the coast of north-east England.Fugro will provide geophysical and geotechnical services over the project’s 220 km export cable corridor, as well as further works on the wind farm array.The objective of Fugro’s site investigation is to characterise subsurface conditions along the cable route corridor to better understand the benthic ecology and offshore archaeology of the site, and to enable detailed design for the proposed wind farm.
The site investigation will include surveys performed from five vessels and will be complemented with laboratory testing. As well as Fugro Pioneer, geophysical survey data will be acquired using the Fugro Frontier and Fugro Seeker; two of Fugro’s geotechnical vessels will then follow to provide drilling, and seabed sampling and in situ testing. Once the Geo-data is acquired, Fugro will produce a ground model for innogy.