Provincial Energy Ventures, a privately owned coal pier in Sydney Harbour, is being renamed the Atlantic Canada Bulk Terminal and has begun offering services for marshalling huge steel parts for offshore wind turbines.
Richard Morykot, an engineer and vice-president of the bulk terminal, said the company will still deal in coal, but it is undergoing a major transition.
“I think it’s new energy for this region and there are spinoffs,” he said. “We just completed a lot of work and we are slowing down as of today, but there’s been a lot of different activity on the site for a lot of different companies, a lot of local companies.
“Sand bags, cranes, labour, civil construction companies, welders, riggers. There’s many parts to this and … when we build the business bigger, there’ll be more opportunities.”
The coal pier was built early in the last century with slag from the former Sydney steel plant, covering more than 40 hectares of land with a 500-metre-long wharf.
Morykot said its construction makes it ideal for holding massive steel materials and the wharf has room for multiple ships to load or unload turbine parts.
Because of its history and construction, the company was able to get the site ready in a couple of weeks with very little investment, mostly by clearing and levelling the ground.
“We’re very fortunate,” Morykot said. “I mean, this was a steel facility and steel facilities are built, as you can imagine, to support steel, so they’re very robust and they’re strong and we’re benefiting from that.
“It’s a great, positive legacy of the Sydney steel plant.”
The 15 giant steel tubes now on the Sydney site are called monopiles. They are foundations that will be driven into the ocean bottom to anchor turbines at sea.
The monopiles, weighing hundreds of tonnes, are made of steel nearly 12 centimetres thick, are up to 10 metres in diameter and up to 80 metres long.
They are destined for offshore wind projects in the U.S., where the industry is well underway.
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