The Department of Energy (DOE) will submit to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) within this month the 10th candidate-port that must be covered in the pre-feasibility study aimed at repurposing these support facilities to service the needs of the flourishing billion-dollar offshore wind industry in the Philippines.

The 10th port had not been included in the initial list furnished to the ADB because further assessments and consultations had been carried out yet with the relevant industry players, according to Energy Undersecretary Giovanni Carlo J. Bacordo.

“We still have to get inputs from developers…the ports we identified, these are intended to be marshaling ports and these are the ports that will require the greatest investments. For the 10th port, our commitment to ADB is: we will submit before the end of December 2023,” he stressed.

As marshaling ports, the energy official explained, “that’s where all of the components are put in for storage; and where the turbines are assembled before they are towed into the deployment area. We have identified these 10 ports –and these are recommendations from the developers themselves.”

At the industry's core, the project developers have institutionalized the Pilipinas Offshore Wind Energy Resource Inc. (POWER) as a collaborative undertaking with the government so they can robustly push the redevelopment of the port facilities that will support the targeted mammoth offshore wind installations.

In July this year, the ADB has granted $400,000 technical assistance to the Philippine government to bankroll the conduct of a pre-feasibility study on the targeted repurposing of at least 10 ports to underpin planned fixed bottom as well as floating offshore wind farm projects in various parts of the country.

The initial nine ports identified for examination in the ADB study include Port Irene which is under the supervision of the Cagayan Economic Zone Authority in Cagayan Valley; Currimao Port in Ilocos Norte; then the ports in Subic; Bulalacao in South Mindoro; the International Container Port Complex in Iloilo as well as the Pulupandan port in Negros; while the others are those in Tabaco, Albay; a private port in Batangas as well as the Energy Supply Base (ESB) port facility of state-run Philippine National Oil Company (PNOC), which is also in Batangas.

As emphasized by Bacordo, the outcome of the ADB study is targeted for release by October next year – but there is an appeal from the government if this could be advanced prior to the government budgeting season which will start August-September – that way, the lead agencies like the Department of Transportation (DOTr) and the Philippine Ports Authority (PPA) can already include in their next budget any allotment that they will need for the offshore wind-repurposing of the identified ports.

“The importance of ADB in this collaboration is that: they have technical assistance – there’s a grant in the amount of US$400,000 for the conduct of a pre-feasibility study – and the expected outcome of this pre-feasibility study is to assess the cost for the repurposing of these port facilities,” the DOE official noted.

There are already private sector-drawn figures for the planned redevelopment at the Currimao port – and that had been pegged at $87 million; while for Port Irene, number-crunching placed preliminary figures at $76 million.

“The estimate for Currimao port, it will require about $87 million for it to be repurposed to an offshore wind port - and they even gave recommendation which areas will be reclaimed, what area in the onshore will be expanded and what areas will be annexed; then for Port Irene – they gave a figure of $76 million for this to be repurposed as offshore wind port,” Bacordo indicated.

He, nevertheless, qualified that the repurposing design for these ports had just been set at minimum standard – meaning, they can’t be lined up for multi-use while an offshore wind project is at its development phase.

“These figures, it is minimum standard for offshore wind port -- the area is just 24 hectares after reclamation – so it is the minimum. If you are intending the port for multi-use; you cannot use that port for other purposes while development of the offshore wind project is ongoing,” he expounded.