Offshore wind installation vessel Boreas

In June 2025, offshore wind installation vessel Boreas arrived in Rotterdam, where it was christened by Mayor Carola Schouten of Rotterdam. The vessel is purpose built for the transport and installation of the next generation of foundations and turbines for offshore wind farms. It can install turbines up to 20 MW and is the largest of its kind, measuring 175 metres in length with a 155-metre-high boom, which can lift more than 3,200 tonnes. Its 4 giant legs, each measuring 126 metres, allow the vessel to be jacked up and work in waters up to 70 metres deep. The size of the vessel makes it more economical as it reduces the total time needed to bring materials to offshore projects.

The Boreas is a frontrunner in sustainability because of its dual-fuel system. It is also the first of its kind capable of operating on methanol, increasing its flexibility and resilience. In addition, the vessel has cutting-edge active emissions control technology and a battery pack of about 6,000 kWh that can further reduce fuel consumption and emissions.

Water injection dredger Thor

Water injection dredger Thor was christened in the fourth quarter of 2025. It is a compact water injection dredger that provides us with greater operational flexibility as it can be disassembled to be transported on trucks. Water Injection Dredging (WID) is a dredging technique that removes sediment ‘the natural way’. It is an efficient and environmentally friendly way of maintaining the depth of navigation channels, ports and rivers. A water injection dredger can work very close to embankments and quay walls because of the manoeuvrability of the vessel.

New flexible fallpipe vessels

We commissioned 2 flexible fallpipe vessels from the same shipyard in Yantai that built the Boreas. The vessels expand our seabed intervention capacity, vital for protecting and stabilising offshore energy assets. The first vessel is expected to enter the market in 2028 and the second 1 year later. The new vessels will be state of the art, featuring multi-fuel engines (running on biofuel and methanol), a DC-grid with large-capacity battery storage, and an energy-efficient hull design and rock-handling system. These technologies reduce CO₂ emissions, thereby supporting Van Oord’s net-zero strategy.

Zero emissions

In 2025, we finalised our analysis of the top 25 vessels responsible for the highest levels of CO₂ emissions. This analysis will be used to consider investment proposals to upgrade these vessels to use climate-neutral fuels on a schedule that corresponds with planned maintenance.

A busy fleet

2025 was a busy year for our fleet, with many active projects requiring our vessels and their crews. We have been actively improving our processes, which has meant implementing continuous data analysis and increasing our use of sensor technology to enable more predictive maintenance. We are working with other departments such as IT, Survey and Procurement to further improve our use of data and technology.

Training

With the increasing role of IT‑driven technology on board of our vessels, we are shifting from traditional hands-on, on‑the‑job training towards modern solutions that support our crew and operators through dedicated shore-based simulators replicating onboard systems. These in-house simulators enable training for specific tasks that are critical to our operations. In 2025, we developed plans to expand our current dredging training facilities to include offshore energy equipment. We already successfully provide in‑depth production training for our dredging fleet, and we aim to have the new facilities operational for dedicated training programmes for specific offshore wind installation vessels, cable‑laying vessels and flexible fallpipe vessels. The simulators will allow us to train critical operations virtually, reduce teething problems on (new) vessels, and build highly effective teams equipped with the full range of relevant skills and knowledge.

Crew

In 2025, we provided personnel for projects around the world, holding steady at about the same level of staffing as in 2024. We continue to optimise our global employment structure and recruitment practices to foster employee retention and support recruitment of the best people.

Thanks to the efforts of our crew and staff, we achieved lower rates of lost time incidents and damage to our vessels this year, meeting our targets and minimising disruption and loss.

Main equipment