Louis Dreyfus TravOcean is a French subsea engineering company specialising in the installation and protection of submarine cables. Founded in Marseille in 1977 to serve the marine works market, it carried out its first major power cable project in 1978 for Électricité de France on the IFA 2000 interconnection between France and England. Over more than 35 years the company has diversified from power cables into oil and gas umbilicals, submarine telecommunications cables and, more recently, offshore wind. In 1998 it became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Louis Dreyfus Armateurs group and was renamed LD TravOcean, adopting the name Louis Dreyfus TravOcean in 2013. The headquarters are in La Ciotat, with an operational base in Dunkirk and subsidiaries in the United Arab Emirates, the Netherlands and Australia. The company states that it employs around fifty specialists.
Louis Dreyfus TravOcean provides turnkey subsea cable services from route selection and engineering through cable loading at manufacturing plants, offshore installation, protection, post-lay burial, maintenance and repair. It works in shallow waters across all seabed types and with fibre optic, power and umbilical cables, chartering and adapting support vessels for projects worldwide. The firm designs and builds its own subsea machinery, including ROVs, trenchers, ploughs, jetting systems and associated burial tools, and uses this capability to tailor equipment to specific seabed and project conditions.
The company has an extensive track record on European offshore wind projects, including London Array, Anholt, Butendiek, Amrumbank, Baltic 2, Nordsee One, Veja Mate, Beatrice, Merkur, Trianel Borkum II and Saint-Nazaire, working both on infield array cables and export cable burial. It has delivered inter-array cable installation on the Saint-Nazaire offshore wind farm in consortium with Prysmian and has been involved in the Dogger Bank offshore wind development and the Yeu–Noirmoutier (EMYN) wind farm inter-array cable campaign. On these projects it develops bespoke installation systems, uses ROV-based solutions for rocky seabeds and applies environmentally focused protection methods such as recycled cast-iron shells and rock bag stabilisation sourced from local quarries, in line with group-wide commitments to safety, environmental protection and sustainable development.
