Assessment of multi-use offshore platforms: structure classification and design challenges

As the world continues to experience problems including lack of seafood and high energy demands, this paper provides assessment for integrated multi-use offshore (MUP) platforms as a step towards exploiting open seawater in a sustainable way to harvest food and energy. The paper begins with background about MUP, what is MUP and why. The potential energy technologies which can be involved in an offshore platform are introduced with addressing similar applications all over the world. The paper presented the state of the art of MUP structures on the light of EU funded programs. MUP would have a positive impact on various marine activities such as tourism, aquaculture, transport, oil and gas and leisure. However, there are concerns about the negative impact of MUP on the marine environment and ecosystem. Building an MUP with 100% renewable energy resources still a challenge as large storage capacity must be considered with a well-designed control system. However, marine bio-mass would play a vital role in reducing battery size and improving power supply reliability. DC-systems have never been considered for offshore platforms which could be a better alternative as a simpler control system required with lower costs, lower distribution losses and increased system efficiency, so studying the feasibility of using DC-systems for MUP is required.