Subsea Micropiles

Making waves in Scotland’s offshore wind industry

As a global leader in offshore wind, Scotland has some of the world’s most ambitious development plans. However, turning that ambition into bankable projects means they must be successfully underwritten and insured. Therefore, having a better understanding of the seabed is critical.

As a full-service seabed imaging, anchor and foundation company, those challenges are precisely why Scotland has become an important base for Subsea Micropiles’ growth. 

Established in 2017 by co-founders CEO Derek Robertson and Director of Geotechnical Engineering John Machin, Subsea Micropiles leads the adaptation of terrestrial micropiling technology to the offshore construction sector for high-performance seabed foundations and anchors. 

Headquartered in Dublin, the company has been supported by Enterprise Ireland through its High Potential Start-Up programme and has received funding to support the development and commercialisation of its technology. 

In 2025, at the historic Scapa Flow off the Orkney Islands, Subsea Micropiles demonstrated its proprietary Acoustic Zoom® technology to image the sub-seabed before, during and after installation, providing detailed insight into the ground conditions surrounding the anchor. The project demonstrated an approach that could help address challenges facing offshore wind development in Scotland and beyond, including better understanding of increasingly complex seabed conditions and reducing the project cost and risk as a result of doing so. 

By replacing large diameter piles, the company’s micropile solutions have the potential to transform the economics of offshore windfarm construction by removing the need for very large, expensive and limited crane vessels.

The cost advantages of micropiles are clear. “Relying on legacy Oil & Gas anchoring solutions have ruinous consequences for offshore wind, as they were never designed to be installed at industrial scale. They require very large or highly specialised expensive vessels for installation which is quite simply unaffordable and unscalable for offshore wind.”

For a 100-turbine wind farm, Robertson estimates that anchors and foundations alone would represent a contract of €300 million or more. The scale of that requirement highlights not only the cost challenge facing offshore wind developers, but also the pressure that large-scale deployment could place on an already constrained international supply chain. “We liberate construction from those constraints in the supply chain because we can use smaller interchangeable vessels. This is a hugely beneficial disruption.  If you can get rid of those large crane vessels, you fundamentally change the economics of offshore construction to begin with.”

The micropile technology is just part of the story, however. “We're doing this on the back of a revolution in subsea robotics over the past couple of decades that includes subsea drilling systems.” This enables the micropiles to be installed by relatively small robotic systems.

“Fundamental to our design is understanding intimately how it's installed,” he adds. “We took on that challenge with a team of very experienced experts by building a first of a kind subsea drilling system for micropile construction.”

The company has also undertaken important research in geophysical surveying. “Understanding seabed conditions and soil properties is critically important and is a significant pain point for the industry. A lot of money is thrown at traditional approaches with extremely poor results. We had a vision of measuring soil properties during the installation process by exploiting the sound energy of the drilling process to measure soil properties. That has evolved to become a whole new site investigation and micro-siting capability and we're building a separate commercial pipeline for that.”

Scotland’s offshore wind industry is a key target market for the company. “We formed a subsidiary in Scotland in 2021 to give us access to the market. We have a formidable sales pipeline. We have suffered, as everybody in the industry supply chain has, from delays in the progress of offshore wind, floating in particular. But we have nurtured relationships with companies that are best positioned to go forward. 

That commitment to Scotland has continued to grow. At the end of 2025, Subsea Micropiles relocated its Aberdeenshire operations to larger premises in Westhill. The company also continues to draw on an international network of industrial partners and suppliers. These include Mincon, the Irish drilling technology company and one of Subsea Micropiles’ earliest industrial partners, alongside Halliburton, a recognised expert in subsea cementing, and Marubeni-Itochu Steel Inc., a global steel distributor based in Japan. 

Looking ahead, Robertson points to what he describes as a gold rush mentality that took hold five or six years ago that saw promoters and investors acquiring seabed rights and assembling portfolios of projects to build out. “Everybody was liquored up on the idea that turbines can just get bigger and bigger and bigger. The simple physics is that a turbine creates a load that goes all the way down to the seabed. And that's getting bigger and bigger and bigger, making that problem more acute, increasing the cost of construction and the importance of understanding soil conditions. That's our opportunity.”

With Scotland’s floating wind sector now moving from ambition towards delivery, solving those challenges will be critical. For Subsea Micropiles, it’s growing presence in Scotland puts the company close to the projects, expertise and supply chain that could help turn that opportunity into reality. 

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