A new offshore wind industry services player has been established by Ayman Asfari, former chief executive of Petrofac.
Venterra Group, set up with a vision to deliver offshore wind engineering, construction and operations services, through acquiring and partnering with experienced and differentiated providers, has already snapped up UK-based offshore contractor FoundOcean and equipment fabricator Osbit, as well as the Dublin-based offshore engineering and design consultancy, Gavin & Doherty Geosolutions. The businesses together have offices in 13 locations, operate in nine countries and have over 250 employees.
Venterra has assembled a strong board and management team comprising Asfari as executive chairman, former Petrofac chief operating officer Rob Jewkes as CEO and Ivan Ronald, former CFO of GKN Aerospace, as chief financial officer. Non-executive directors are Vivienne Cox, former CEO of BP’s gas, power and renewable business, and Tove Feld, former CTO of Orsted and head of offshore engineering at Siemens Wind Power.
The company intends to invest around £250m ($344m) by mid-2022 in capabilities across the wind farm life cycle and, in due course, seek a public listing for its shares.
Ayman Asfari commented: “Offshore wind energy is growing fast around the world and is essential to the global energy transition. But there is a supply chain crunch – the services industry supporting wind is highly fragmented and needs greater scale and additional capital to meet soaring demand from governments and developers with ambitious renewable energy commitments. Venterra has been created to help meet this challenge. We are bringing together companies with the right experience and specialist skills and providing them with funding and support to create a services champion with the scale and breadth required by the market. We aim to create a new force in the offshore wind industry which will be a world class industrial company.”
