Martin Brown

Martin is a Chartered Naval Architect/Project Manager and has spent most of his 30+ year professional career in the oil industry working for Micoperi/Saipem, McDermott, DNV GL/Noble Denton and Aqualis-Braemar. He has also had a parallel interest in OTEC since undertaking an undergraduate dissertation on the subject. This led on to MSc and MBA dissertations looking respectively at cold water pipe design and investment appraisal of a multiple product land based OTEC system.  After completing his MSc at Cranfield University Martin worked on OTEC as a Research Associate at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, investigating a new design of Cold Water Pipe (CWP). 

Martin’s areas of expertise include floating production (FPSOs, semis and floating wind turbines), transportation and installation/removal engineering plus decommissioning. He has particular knowledge of mooring systems design and integrity and is author of a number technical papers, some of which are on OTEC.  He was Project Manager for Noble Denton’s phase 1 and 2 Mooring Integrity Joint Industry Projects (JIPs), which were supported by organisations throughout the world. He has extensive Marine Warranty experience following projects from design through to field installation including complex non-standard marine operations. Martin has experience of technical due diligence and expert witness work, including court attendance. 

Martin was Chairman of the Group tasked with developing IEC’s standard “Part 20: Design and analysis of an Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) plant – General guidance” and is presently convenor for an ad hoc group to maintain and improve Pt 20.  Hence any comments on Pt 20 are most welcome.

Today Martin runs Ocean Energy Systems Limited (OESL), his own consultancy company based in Aberdeen, Scotland.  Aberdeen is the heart of the UK’s offshore oil and increasingly renewables industry.