Expert Series: Steven Rizea on specialist offshore engineering

Phillip Gales: Good morning everyone! I'm very excited to be speaking with Stephen Rizea from Deep Reach Technology. Steven, how are you doing?

Steven Rizea: Excellent Phillip, how are you?

Phillip Gales: Doing well, thanks. I'm very excited to chat with you. Can you tell us first how you got involved with Deep Reach Tech?

Steven Rizea: Yeah. So I'm a mechanical engineer that sort of fell into the ocean and never left.

My technical expertise is computer modelling and simulation, and that's how I met John Halkyard working on Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, back in 2008, and we worked together on a Lockheed Martin project. Then, later, when John's deep-sea mining business started to take off, he had some more computer modelling work that he needed help with, so he gave me a call.

The relationship grew to the point that deep-sea mining became a core element of Deep Reach Tech's business offerings and I was invited to step in and take over the company as we were developing that business line.

Image of deepwater drillships cold-stacked

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) concept

Phillip Gales: So what are the main areas that Deep Reach Tech works in, and what do you focus on?

Steven Rizea: The genesis of Deep Reach Tech was definitely deep-sea mining, and then because of John and my history with OTEC, marine renewables became a natural place to expand into.

Offshore platform concepts studied, taken from NOWRDC final report

We began expanding into offshore wind with the story of having all this offshore oil and gas experience, and being able to apply it to the offshore wind industry. That started with a government grant from NOWRDC, specifically with a drive to adapt offshore oil and gas into offshore wind. That expanded into looking at various platforms motions and looking into anchoring and anchoring technology. Then all of our experience doing techno economic assessments, both for deep-sea mining and OTEC, works fantastically well in wind as well.

Phillip Gales: That makes complete sense. What are the main services that Deep Reach Tech tends to provide?

Steven Rizea: So most of our work tends to be in feasibility studies, trade studies, subsystem design, and system integration.

A lot of what we do is rooted in techno-economic assessment; I'm a huge fan of value-driven engineering. I think you always need to know the “why” of every design decision, and 9 times out of 10, the “why” is cost or risk driven. So we always try to frame our recommendations to clients in terms of effects on overall system technical feasibility or costs, even if we're looking at a single sub-system.

Phillip Gales: Interesting. I assume you can't talk about a lot of your clients, but we do know from public records that “The Metals Company” (or, “Deep Green” as it was known), contracted you to do their offshore development plan, and that was a major part of their IPO in 2021. Is that the sort of work kind of your bread and butter?

Steven Rizea: It's hard to decide. I don't know if Deep Reach Teach has bread and butter - we're such a small company that we tend to hop around, depending on where various projects sit.

Deep Green was really the first mover in deep-sea mining, they needed a concept design, and that's what we did for them. As they've moved along through their process, we've helped support them with engineering simulations to help convince their investors that their concept was technically credible. Then we moved into elements of design review as they put their project together, and we framed their concept in the overall, deep-sea mining, objective.

Because we understand the system from seabed to shore, we know what questions to ask, and what elements engineering contractors and designers should be focused on. That parlayed all the way into serving as a qualified person for their official filings as part of their IPO.

So we add value all the way up to and including execution of a pilot mining test. We can write technical specifications for actually developing and demonstrating technology subsea, and then we can work with clients to ensure that their contractor is meeting the objectives as laid out in the specifications, so serving as the “owner's engineer technical expert in the field and responding to contractor questions as appropriate.

Offshore deep-sea mining concept design work done by Deep Reach Technology for Deep Green / The Metals Company

Offshore production concept design for Deep Green, taken from NORI-D Initial Assessment, publicly filed by The Metals Company as part of their 2021 IPO

In that sense our objective is that we want to help our clients execute a successful test, so the client has everything that they need for their next step, whether that's regulatory filings, or further rounds of investment.

Offshore deep-sea mining concept design material handling, dewatering and offloading systems

Material handling, dewatering and offloading systems, taken from NORI-D Initial Assessment

Phillip Gales: How do you think about in-house engineering versus an outsourced consulting model? What are the advantages and benefits of bringing Deep Reach Tech in versus building your own in-house engineering team?

Steven Rizea: I don't think you have to choose - I think that each project is going to have a balance between the two.

For example, in the early stage of a project, there typically isn't enough of an in-house engineering base, and it's difficult to accumulate people with the right experience to do that concept design.

Then, as you move forward, and you get more and more into detailed engineering, the scope of the project grows to the point that you're going to have engineering contractors doing independent designs. You may have one group doing your production support vessel, another doing your riser, and another doing your collector. Then it's important to have somebody like Deep Reach Tech on staff to help integrate those systems and ask all of the questions right.

If you want to have a successful test, somebody has to be in there asking the right questions: how are you instrumenting the riser? How are you going to validate your collector mean-time-between-failure? How are you going to prove that you can offload nodules at the rate you've assumed to validate your economic models?

There ends up being a thousand and one questions across the system, and I'm not aware of any in-house engineering team that's able to answer (or ask!) the questions across the whole spectrum the way we can.

Phillip Gales: How many people are there in the world that can actually ask, answer, or know what questions to ask about that when it comes to deep-sea mining? It's not exactly a large industry and you've basically got a handful of other people actually have the experience and the expertise to do this.

Steven Rizea: Right. And the folks that have developed that experience in the past few years are tied up with giant engineering contractors, like Allseas, GSR or NOV.

So even in those situations, if you're a mining company and you know that you're going to partner with a major engineering contractor, you still need to have somebody on your side of the table that knows what questions to ask.

Polymetallic nodule collector preliminary design, taken from NORI-D Initial Assessment

Phillip Gales: So hang on, if I wanted to launch a deep-sea mining company today, and I had the financing and connections to get the equipment together, what you're really saying is that Deep Reach Tech is the only independent engineering consulting firm that has the expertise to assist them in succesfully executing a deep-sea mining project?

Steven Rizea: Well, as far as the functional design, I believe we are uniquely qualified to advise on the overall system and key subsystems, absolutely.

Phillip Gales: What does a typical engagement look like for Deep Reach Tech then? Are there specific steps that you go through, or is it very variable, according to the client?

Steven Rizea: It tends to be variable according to the client. Again, there are some fundamental stages that you go through - most people at the concept feasibility stage have similar questions - and that's our most common point of engagement. We usually start with a Design Basis, and then our objective is to keep moving the project forward successfully by bringing in our expertise at key points, decisions and at major milestones.

Phillip Gales: You mentioned that you come from a software modelling background. What do you tend to specialize in?

100MW OTEC Design with Cold Water Pipe, OSTI OTEC final report

Steven Rizea: My specialty is computer models that don't have existing solutions! So I've run CFD, I've run finite element analysis, but that's not really where my passion lies. There's plenty of people in the world that can use these tools, that can execute the models, and can give you the results that you want.

But for something like OTEC, for example, we had questions that spanned hydraulics, pressure drops, thermodynamics, electrical controls and economics all rolled into one. There didn't exist a tool that you could use to integrate those different fields and do analysis. So that's what we built for that project.

Deep-sea mining has a similar problem, where you can go off, and you can run Orcaflex, and it can tell you what your riser shape is. But it doesn't tell you how that affects your ship, your collector, your downtime, or your trans-shipment options. So where I personally tend to get excited about a system is the ability to model enough of it that you can make meaningful design decisions and really understand the system.

Phillip Gales: So what you're saying is that we've got the computing power and engineering models to build full digital twins of the entirety of a production support vessel, riser, harvesters and other support vessels?

Steven Rizea: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's a fundamental shift in how engineering work gets done.

I have a personal philosophy that I call “simulate don't solve”. When you're in engineering school, you're given a concrete problem, or even a fairly complicated, open, ended problem, but ultimately the objective is to find a specific answer - like the required thickness of a piece of metal. That's how engineers are trained, but that's not how the real world works.

"I have a personal philosophy that I call “simulate don't solve”"

I've never done a design where I delivered an answer that says you need an 8 inch diameter gear where somebody doesn't ask, “what if it's 7-½ inches? Is that going to work?” If you've gone and solved the problem, then you have to go back and start over. If, instead, you write a simulation that works from core engineering principles, then you can modify your inputs and answer this type of question instantly.

I started building this philosophy back in 2008 when I first started working on OTEC, and I've seen this convergent evolution where a lot of other engineers are coming to the same conclusion. The result of that movement is the growth of digital twins as design tools.

Phillip Gales: So rather than trying to solve a 1-time calculation of a specific variable, it is better to build a simulation of the collector, the riser, separator, dewatering, offloading, etc., and you can play around with that. You can run various simulations of, for example, running one versus two collectors, or vary the width of the collector then see what component is actually the limiting factor. You're trying to optimize the entirety of the system.

Steven Rizea: Precisely. And that's that's the power of the digital twin, especially for something as complicated as deep-sea mining.

If you were to do a high level analysis, you buy a bunch of equipment, you buy a bunch of fuel, you pay people to operate the equipment, and you sell nodules onshore for some dollars per ton. Your objective is to ensure that your dollars per ton revenue is high enough that everything else can get paid for.

"Collector Ship 1" concept, taken from NORI-D Initial Assessment

All of those subsystems are integrated, so running 1 collector versus 2 changes the demands on your riser, your ship, your vessels and your transportation to shore. What a digital twin lets you do is see the cascade effect all the way through of every single design decision, and in the end you have a very concrete basis for comparison, which is your dollars per ton to shore.

Phillip Gales: Wow! So suddenly you can start to make very major engineering decisions based upon the certainty that this model brings you. You can practically model what major system changes look like through various operational scenarios.

Steven Rizea: Precisely. To give you a concrete example that's come up in the real world in deep-sea mining. A client has a riser, sitting on a ship, with a given diameter. They want to know if it will work for a particular pilot mining test, or in commercial production.

It's a spectacularly complicated problem, right? Because you have to account for all these subsystems. But if you've got the digital twin then you can answer that question in a matter of a couple of days as opposed to months if you had to sit down and do a genuine design.

Phillip Gales: Of course you've got the complication within deep-sea mining that a lot of this equipment is not purpose built. A lot of it is modified from pre-existing deepwater drillships, or pre-existing pumps and other offshore equipment. So you get the ability to take those pre-existing models, and to sort of bung the pieces together like Lego to see if it works or not.

So is this just used in the design stage, or does this also go into the operations?

Steven Rizea: If you really want to leverage the power of a digital twin, you use it all the way through a project, from the early design stage through to operations.

The advantage there is that it lets you connect your digital twin to real data coming from your operations, so that you can then compare what you're seeing with what you expected.

You can investigate things like a production rate that should be 500 tons an hour, but it's actually 450 tons an hour. You can interrogate your digital twin, spot the issues or bottlenecks, and realise, for example, that a particular valve is stuck half shut. You can really pinpoint what's going on.

You can also simulate things like the impact and potential responses to a hurricane coming in. You can predict how long you might be shut down for, or model different shutdown options to see which works best. You can interrogate your digital twin and find out which is going to have the lowest financial impact on your system overall.

Phillip Gales: So you can actually make financial, economic, and also safety based operational decisions using this model?

Steven Rizea: Absolutely. Right down to effects that are going to matter, but aren't immediately obvious. Right? If you're concerned about a hurricane coming, and you want to preserve the safety of your personnel and your equipment, you may not be thinking about the fact that you have 3 cargo carriers lined up and you're not going to have any nodules to deliver to them. Is there a way to redirect those and mitigate the impact? You can get those answers from a digital twin because they're simply going to bubble up out of the operation of your model.

Phillip Gales: As an engineer and an operator, I absolutely love this concept. But I'm quite intrigued because you mentioned early on using it for convincing investors. Can you speak a bit more about that?

Steven Rizea: Sure. So the challenge for an investor in any sort of highly technical field is understanding how real everything is. It's very easy to make presentations, images and videos look extremely good, but investors are sharp enough that they start digging into the engineering details. They want to know if the video that they've watched has mathematics, physics and engineering behind it, and not just art.

Because this digital twin movement has been building, there's a variety of tools out there that will produce investor quality animations, but based on a real physics engine with engineering principles embedded.

This is something that we put together for the Metals Company several years ago, and there may be investors listening to this interview that have actually seen this system in operation. We built a complete model of the mining system from the production support vessel all the way down to the collector on the seabed.

Tornado diagram for The Metals Company project

Tornado diagram of project NPV sensitivities from TMC's Form 10-K

We ran various scenarios of tests, including sailing through the water, running the collectors along the seabed, and calculated the loads on all of the risers, the lines, the surface equipment and the various vessels. We had real numbers and could say “in this movie that you're watching, the tension in that riser is 17 kilotons”

That gives the investor a lot of confidence because they understand it isn't just a pretty picture - there's real engineering happening here.

Phillip Gales: This reminds me of one of the points that Guido from NOV raised, which is that offshore engineering is so fascinating and so huge that it's almost unbelievable. So you're trying to help investors understand what 100,000 tonnes of production support vessel with 4 kilometers of riser actually looks like.

Steven Rizea: Absolutely. One of the interesting things that came out of our simulation for The Metals Company was that you could actually fly around in real time. So you would start looking at the vessel, and then you'd want to go down and look at the collector. But the problem was that it just took too long to fly down that 4 kilometer riser! It really drives home the scale that you're operating at. We had to add a “speed up” button, because otherwise you're sat there descending down the riser for 3 minutes.

Phillip Gales: This reminds me a little bit of some of the work the ISA is doing around trying to help the public visualise the scale and remoteness of deep-sea mining. For example, how distant and remote the Clarion-Clipperton Zone is.

We've spoken a lot about deep-sea mining, but I know that Deep Reach Tech also has a lot of expertise in offshore wind. Can you tell us more about that?

Steven Rizea: Floating offshore wind is a huge market. There's a lot happening that can use our expertise and experience from offshore oil and gas.

There's hundreds of floating offshore wind platforms out there, so how on earth do you choose among the various concepts to ensure that your platform is stable and optimal. Deep Reach Tech is perfectly placed to evaluate these concepts; from anchoring loads through to survivability, and again driving it all the way to dollars per kilowatt hour generated.

One of the big elephants in the room for the floating offshore wind industry is that if somebody decided tomorrow to fund every single floating offshore wind project currently in the pipeline, then you couldn't build even a fraction of them, because we don't have the manufacturing infrastructure. There's a variety of people looking at solving that problem, and that's an area that Deep Reach Tech is well placed to start evaluating.

Evaluating these various concepts ultimately becomes a form of techno-economic assessment. You need to know what it will cost you to resolve all of the challenges, how real is the technology, and what is the opportunity? “How real is the technology” really turns into how much is it going to cost to really get it over the line.

Estimates of future installed offshore wind power generation, per the IEA

Phillip Gales: I was looking at some of the IEA figures for the growth of renewables, and particularly offshore wind generating capacity. The figures are pretty astounding - they project something like a 20% annual growth in offshore wind generation capacity for the next decade. That's just an enormous amount of wind turbines that need to be installed on floating installations.

Steven Rizea: Yeah, and there's multiple parts of that challenge that are still unsolved. Example, does installation of the turbine and tower happen at a port, or at sea? Those are 2 completely different options, with totally different solutions and problems to resolve.

Floating spar platform and offshore wind pylon concept

Concept for a floating spar and wind pylon concept, from NOWRDC final report

Then, once you're on site, you need to fix this platform to the seabed somehow, and there's a variety of different anchoring technologies out there. What's your best, most cost effective solution? Do you share anchors between platforms? That's an area that Deep Reach Tech has expertise in evaluating.

The other sort of subtle one that's just starting to come out is analysis of the seabed where we want to install these things. For the big lease that happened a year and a half ago off the coast of California, for example, a significant portion of those lease areas have a hard bottom, whereas the vast majority of deep sea anchoring technologies have been developed for soft bottoms like the Gulf of Mexico. Anchoring a giant structure that needs a 500 ton anchor on rock doesn't have a good solution right now.

California offshore wind lease areas

So we helped develop a technology called subsea micropiles, which is specifically designed to anchor large floating offshore platforms to a rocky seabed. That's licensed to “Subsea Micropiles” in Ireland, and they have built a subsea micropile installation drill that opens up another 30-40% of the seabed depending on where you're at, because now you can install an offshore wind platform over a rocky seabed.

Phillip Gales: Oh, that's huge. Because a lot of offshore technology has been developed for the Gulf of Mexico, but it's not the ideal place for offshore wind.

Steven Rizea: Well, it's not just that. The Gulf of Mexico, as a wind resource area, is pretty abysmal. If you compare that to the west coast (of the United States) or the northeast, or off Scotland, where they're putting these big wind turbines, there's no comparison.

Phillip Gales: Fundamentally different resource, fundamentally different quality in terms of the consistency and strength of the wind, but also just a fundamentally different sea bottom - so you need a different technology.