Team Humber trade mission helps MTL secure Norwegian wind contract

An inward trade mission hosted by Team Humber Marine Alliance and Enterprise Europe Yorkshire has helped Alliance member MTL Group secure a multimillion pound deal for work on an offshore wind farm.

MTL Group, the Rotherham-based project manufacturer, is to supply 97 boat landing systems to Aker Solutions, the Norwegian energy group, for Nordsee Ost, a German offshore wind farm.

It is MTL’s largest ever export order and came about after Hull-based THMA and Enterprise Europe Yorkshire attracted Windcluster Mid-Norway to the UK in the middle of last year.

The visit was co-ordinated by THMA’S project office and Tim Barraclough, Enterprise Europe Yorkshire consultant, and took in a number of Team Humber members’ facilities, including MTL’s. This showed MTL’s capabilities in specialist batch fabrications, with its ability to manufacture structures up to 400 tonnes in weight.

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Darren Taylor, MTL business development manager, offshore and renewable energy, said: “The liaison work by Team Humber Marine Alliance was fundamental in us pursuing the opportunity we had identified with Aker in the North Sea. We needed a contact at Aker which coincided with the visit by Windcluster Mid-Norway who were able to give us the details and open the door to this fantastic new contract.”
Mark O’Reilly, director at Hull-based THMA, said: “The mission was an important opportunity to showcase to the Norwegians the collective capabilities of the Humber’s marine and renewable energy companies in a number of sectors, including defence, renewable energy and oil and gas.”MTL secured the deal to supply boat landing systems with Aker Solutions following meetings in the UK and Norway. Manufacture will take place at MTL’s state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Rotherham and its dockside facility on the east coast.

MTL Group, one of the fastest growing project manufacturing specialists in the metals sector, is the UK’s leading secondary steelwork supplier of boat landing systems, and also supplies working platforms, plate beams and nodes.

The contract will use all of the company’s processing equipment, which includes large format hi-definition plasma and laser cutting, robotic tube cutting, automated robot welding and CNC machining.

Twenty-five MTL employees will work on the project at the group’s advanced manufacturing facility in Rotherham. Work has already commenced with the final delivery of boat landings expected by March 2012.