AMPELMANN: Offshore Access: As Easy as Crossing the Street
By ensuring offshore personnel can walk to work safely and efficiently, Ampelmann is driving on tool time and overall productivity whether on wind farm sites or oil and gas platforms. At the same time, the company continues to bolster its own reputation as a market leader. Founder and CEO Jan van der Tempel tells Energy Focus more about the company’s steady growth and ambitions.
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Interview with Jan van der Tempel, CEO and Founder
Ampelmann has spent the last two decades proving that one of offshore energy’s most persistent problems can, with enough engineering conviction, become one of its greatest efficiencies. Moving people safely from a vessel rising and falling in open water onto a fixed offshore structure was once accepted as a compromise between weather, risk and lost working time. Today, in fields from Brazil to Brunei and from the US Atlantic to West Africa, it has become an operational discipline in its own right, and much of that change can be traced back to a university research concept in the Netherlands that refused to stay academic.
Founder and CEO Jan van der Tempel was there before there was a market to lead. “I am a civil engineer by training and I did my master’s thesis on offshore wind and fatigue of monopiles,” he says, describing a career that was already moving between offshore construction and the early wind sector when a conference in Berlin in 2002 shifted the trajectory entirely. A presentation on accessing offshore turbines from vessels left more questions than answers, but the scale of the issue was obvious. “I discussed accessing turbines with a colleague and we knew there was potential.”
That conversation became an engineering obsession. Berlin also gave the business its name. “The German word for traffic light is Ampel and the figures in the traffic lights in Berlin wear a hat… We thought it was a nice code name for the invention. We later came up with the tag line ‘offshore access as easy as crossing the street’.” It was a playful origin for what would become one of the offshore industry’s most serious safety interventions.
What followed was not a sales exercise but a technical reversal of an accepted maritime problem. “We looked at putting a flight simulator on the boat. Instead of creating motions to give a training pilot the simulation of flight, we did it the other way around and take the motions of the boat and compensate them to keep the platform completely stable. The gangway is extended and crew can be transferred safely even in high waves.” With students brought in to test feasibility, scale model trials completed in 2005 and a first prototype delivered in 2007, the concept matured quickly into the A-type system that still anchors Ampelmann’s fleet today.
By 2008, the university spin-out had become a commercial company, backed by a uniquely fertile Dutch industrial ecosystem. “In the early days, we were a university research team with funding from government and sponsors to help us build the prototype… It was a biosphere where you have big customer companies and you can access industry experts quite quickly – and they love when new ideas come up.” That proximity to Delft University, Rotterdam’s port complex and the headquarters of offshore majors gave Ampelmann something many engineering start-ups never get: immediate contact with customers who understood the pain point.
MARKET SPACE
The pain point was larger than many realised. Before motion-compensated gangways, offshore transfers were defined by compromises. Smaller boats bumped onto ladders in calm conditions, swing ropes were used in more benign oil and gas geographies, and helicopters handled the premium end where budgets allowed. None of those options created consistency. None created the kind of floating operational base offshore developers increasingly needed as projects moved farther out, grew more complex and demanded longer campaigns.
“Now, our system can turn the vessel into a hotel offshore with people sleeping on the vessel and are not hindered by wind or waves, walking across to do the work on the wind turbine or oil and gas platform,” says Van der Tempel. “We created an intermediate section where everything is vessel based… It was a niche in the market which did not exist and has now grown into a big walk to work market sector in which we are still the market leader globally.”
Industry analysis now treats walk-to-work systems as standard hardware on offshore wind service vessels and an increasingly normal feature in offshore oil and gas maintenance campaigns, with the global market concentrated around only a handful of specialist suppliers. Ampelmann remains widely recognised as the pioneer and still operates one of the largest dedicated fleets in the business, with more than 80 systems deployed globally and over 12.5 million personnel transfers completed.
Scale has followed necessity. “We have worked on all continents, and we continue to do so. We are 450 people globally. Our main work is through our rental fleet, more than 50 units which we own. We get them on a vessel; we send operators along with them to complete jobs which can be weeks or months or years.” The model has given Ampelmann more than product sales; it has embedded the company into offshore execution itself, with a 24/7 operational support centre and local presences wherever campaigns become sustained.
That means staying close not only to vessel owners, but to the asset operators whose risk profile depends on every transfer. “Parking a big ship next to a multimillion dollar asset creates a safety case, and that needs to be managed. On the rental side, and in the systems we sell, our end customers really appreciate our involvement in making sure their operations are safe.”
It also means retaining engineering control. “We design and build our own systems. We work with many suppliers on sub-components, but the core of the design, assembly, testing and certification is done inhouse,” Van der Tempel confirms. In Rotterdam, that in-house production capability has allowed Ampelmann to continually iterate the original concept into a broad family of systems, from the flagship A-type to the larger E-type designed for rougher seas and larger offshore wind campaigns. The E-type, capable of safe transfers in sea states up to 4.5m, has become particularly important in exposed Atlantic and Asia-Pacific wind projects where weather windows are commercially decisive.
GLOBAL REACH
If the early Ampelmann story was about inventing a market, the current one is about reading several at once. Offshore wind may have created much of the modern walk-to-work narrative, but Ampelmann’s resilience has come from balancing wind and hydrocarbons without ideological hesitation.
“Energy is always up and down – that is the game,” Van der Tempel says. “We do see a balance between oil and gas and offshore wind.” That balance has mattered through Covid disruption, supply chain inflation, vessel shortages and geopolitical uncertainty. While north-west European offshore wind has slowed in places, other geographies have accelerated, and Ampelmann has treated each shift as a navigational adjustment rather than a strategic threat. “Our strategy for the last five years has been navigating shifting winds. If you are on a sailboat, you have to set sails to the wind to ensure you end up at your destination… we continue to sail forward,” he adds.
The proof is in the map. Brazil remains one of the strongest oil and gas markets, where Ampelmann recently secured a two-year extension with Solstad Offshore for continued walk-to-work campaigns. West Africa has re-emerged as an active operational region. The Gulf of Mexico is seeing renewed utilisation. In the Middle East, long-established offices keep systems close to national operators. Across Asia, Taiwan has become a reference point for offshore wind deployment while Korea and Australia begin building their own demand curves.
“We are back in Africa and we see that as a promising market with a lot of possibility… In Asia, offshore wind is now moving beyond just Taiwan,” says Van der Tempel. It is a reminder that while offshore energy headlines often focus on Europe, the practical growth of marine logistics technology is now being decided in globally fragmented pockets of opportunity.
There is also a clear commercial logic behind Ampelmann’s continuing push into smaller, more mobile systems. “We are looking at the areas where special gangway types are required to fit a specific market sector, allowing us low level entry. Our big units are great when you are in the middle of the Atlantic, but shipping those units is costly,” details Van der Tempel. The company’s answer has been a modular portfolio that allows it to tailor access economics to campaign size, sea state and vessel class rather than forcing every customer into one high-end solution.
That modularity is one reason the company’s original A-type remains so relevant. Nearly 50 have now been built in successive generations, while the larger E-type continues to dominate harsher offshore wind scopes and newer electric variants are widening the operational argument beyond safety into sustainability and deck efficiency.
NEXT STAGE
For Van der Tempel, leadership is only meaningful if engineering keeps moving. “We have electrified our A-type, reducing the amount of power required by 80%. We now recuperate all of the power we put in as the waves move up and down.” That electric A-type has already demonstrated a dramatic reduction in vessel power demand while removing bulky hydraulic infrastructure, part of a broader programme to electrify the wider fleet and make motion compensation less energy intensive without compromising workability.
“The amount of power used to balance during a six second wave cycle is significant and electrifying that is a real engineering feat. We want to electrify the whole fleet as everyone talks about ESG – 80% less energy is a real bang for bucks.” In an offshore sector now under pressure to decarbonise not just generation but service logistics, that matters commercially as much as environmentally.
Beyond gangways, Ampelmann is already building the next layer of offshore efficiency. “We are setting up a cargo drone service, flying from the vessels we work on at windfarms. The drones will take cargo from the vessel to the top of a turbine with no manual interaction,” Van der Tempel highlights. The logic is simple but powerful: tools and spare parts delivered in minutes, technicians arriving across the gangway to a ready-to-work turbine instead of waiting for vessel repositioning.
Alongside that are other university-to-market technologies now entering the company’s innovation pipeline, from silent monopile installation systems to long-distance horizontal drilling solutions aimed at easing grid congestion and subsea cable routing. None of it sounds like a gangway company standing still, which is precisely Van der Tempel’s point. “Everything we do is high-tech and we need our engineers to be innovative. These ideas, like any hardware, really have to work and provide value.”
After two decades of turning offshore transfer into a science, Ampelmann is intent on applying the same philosophy to the wider offshore workflow: remove friction, remove wasted motion, remove accepted inefficiency. “I am happy but never satisfied,” he smiles. For a company built on eliminating movement at sea, that restlessness may be its most valuable motion of all.