Abstract
This paper investigates the impact on the availability, uptime, and design conditions of offshore facilities and operations due to climate change. As the physical processes that generate ocean waves are intrinsically linked to atmospheric conditions, the ocean wave climate will change as global temperatures increase and global winds change. The impacts on offshore facilities have been investigated by studying and comparing wave climate predictions for a range of climate change scenarios, considering both the magnitude of temperature increase and the time horizon of the scenario. This paper relies on the scenarios generated in multiple revisions of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP).
This paper presents the impacts of climate change in a series of case studies:
• Changing design wave conditions for several potential offshore wind farm developments around Australia.
• The predicted change in the availability and uptime of five Single Point Mooring (SPM) terminals around South America.
• The predicted change in durations of offshore platform decommissioning activities and the duration of operations to install new floating facilities.