Securing maritime infrastructures: a framework to evaluate physical protection measures for offshore wind farms

Abstract

Offshore infrastructures such as subsea pipelines and data/ electricity cables are proliferating and expanding rapidly, playing a growing role in ensuring energy supplies and global data flows. Yet these infrastructures are increasingly threatened by hybrid threats and sabotage attacks disguised as accidents. Protecting offshore infrastructures against hybrid threats is difficult, however, due to the very distinct physical environment at sea with large distances, extreme weather conditions, and underwater vulnerabilities. With this work, the authors propose a framework to determine systematically the resilience capacity of possible Physical Protection Measures (PPM) in the offshore industry based on specific performance indicators including costs, personnel and technical requirements, and attack vectors. We provide an overview of offshore wind farm (OWF) protection goals and functional needs and analyze two specific PPMs to protect OWF, namely protection nets and cardinal marks, to illustrate our framework. We conclude by discussing how physical protection measures can increase the resilience of maritime infrastructures and offshore industries.