The Oyster Restoration Company (TORC) and offshore engineering specialist DEME have completed EuroReefs, a large-scale native European flat oyster restoration project in the Belgian North Sea, marking a significant step towards industrial-scale marine habitat restoration.
Commissioned by Belgium’s Federal Public Service Health, Food Chain Safety and Environment and financed through the European Union’s NextGenerationEU programme, the project saw a 100-cubic-metre living reef installed in a single day at a dedicated offshore site in the Hinderbanken area.
Designed to support Belgium’s marine restoration objectives and the EU Nature Restoration Regulation, EuroReefs builds on the earlier Bel-Reefs 1 pilot and signals the start of a multi-year effort to restore native oyster reefs across the North Sea.
“Native oyster reefs were once the foundation of a healthy North Sea, and losing them was one of the great unnoticed environmental disasters of the last century,” said Giles Cadman, founder of TORC.
“EuroReefs shows that putting it right can now be done at industrial scale. With DEME’s offshore capability and the Belgian Government’s backing, restoration can fit within the way marine work is already delivered.”
TORC bred and settled 10.4 million disease-free native European flat oysters (Ostrea edulis) onto the reef structure, with the aim of establishing a self-sustaining reef of at least one million oysters after natural attrition.
DEME transported and installed the living reef using a 70-metre split hopper barge, demonstrating that large-scale ecological restoration can be integrated into conventional offshore construction operations.
Tomas Sterckx, project manager at DEME, said the initiative demonstrated how offshore engineering could support nature recovery. “By combining our marine engineering capabilities with TORC’s ecological expertise, we are helping to restore marine ecosystems, enhance biodiversity, and build more resilient environments in the Belgian North Sea,” he said.
