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Equinor, Oceanex to study feasibility of 2-GW wind park off Australia

Veselina Petrova

~2 minutes

Arkona offshore wind farm in the Baltic Sea in Mukran on the German island of Rügen. (Photo: Eskil Eriksen / Equinor ASA)

The Australian government said today it has granted Norway’s Equinor ASA (NYSE:EQNR) and its New Zealand partner Oceanex Energy a feasibility license for an up to 2-GW offshore wind project off New South Wales.

The companies have been preliminarily offered a license for their Novocastrian Wind project in the Hunter region of the Aussie state, one of Australia’s four officially declared zones for offshore wind development. According to the press statement, the project is the only one being offered authorisation for feasibility studies as other applications were for overlapping areas and were “found to be of lower merit.”

Provided that the feasibility of the Novocastrian project is proven, Equinor and Oceanex will be able to apply for a commercial license that will give them the right to install the offshore complex and generate electricity commercially. The AUD-10-billion (USD 6.67bn/EUR 6.21bn) project, if it moves forward, is expected to open about 3,000 jobs during the construction phase.

The proposed offshore park could secure electricity supply to around 1.2 million homes.

Equinor and Oceanex joined forces in the summer of 2022 to file feasibility license applications for offshore wind acreage in the Hunter Valley, Illawarra and South Coast regions of New South Wales.

(AUD 1.0 = USD 0.667/EUR 0.621)