bp and Marubeni Announce partnership to explore offshore wind in Japan
BP has partnered up with Marubeni, a Japanese integrated trade and investment firm, to explore a potential offshore wind power project in Japan. Both companies have decided to develop strategic cooperation for offshore wind and possibly other decarbonization initiatives, such as hydrogen.
As part of the deal, bp will join Marubeni in establishing an offshore wind project off the coast of Japan — a location with abundant wind resources – and will purchase 49 per cent ownership in the project. The firms consider this as a first step toward establishing a market-leading position in Japan's offshore wind sector.
bp will build a local offshore wind development team in Tokyo as part of this arrangement. Japan has established a goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2050, to build 10GW of offshore wind power by 2030 and 30-45GW by 2040.
Anja-Isabel Dotzenrath, bp’s executive vice president of gas & low carbon energy, said: “We are unlocking new regions and new opportunities for bp. Combining our international energy expertise and technical capabilities with Marubeni’s track record of wind and energy development and first-class regional relationships, we can together build important new clean energy resources for Japan and Asia. We want to continue to build on bp’s offshore wind portfolio – and we can’t wait to get to work in Japan with Marubeni.”
Since 1960, bp has been doing business in Japan. It now has a sizable oil and LNG trading business as well as a Castrol lubricants business with Japanese clients, which it intends to expand. In 2021, BP decided to collaborate with NYK Line, a Japanese shipping business, on future fuels and transportation technologies to help the hard-to-abate shipping industry decarbonize.
With projects in the United States and the United Kingdom, bp already has a net offshore wind development pipeline of more than 5GW. It has quadrupled its renewables development pipeline to more than 24GW since 2019 and is on track to reach its 20GW renewable capacity development objective by 2025.
Marubeni is a significant offshore wind developer in Japan, having served as the main partner in the development, permitting, and building of the country's first large-scale commercial offshore wind project, the 140MW Akita offshore wind farm project. Marubeni has a total power generation capacity of around 12 GW and has developed and operated more than 2 GW of onshore and offshore wind power across the world.
The transaction is subject to merger control clearances, and once obtained, completion is likely to happen quickly.
