Mathias Viallon

About Mathias Viallon

Mathias is a studied naval architect, with an eight-year professional experience in the maritime, heavy lift, offshore oil & gas and wind industries. He has practical experience for the complete project lifetime up to the offshore execution.

Bi-national (French – German) by birth, he has learned other languages such as English and Spanish early on. He has lived in five different countries and worked in many more.

Education and early career

After growing up in France, Mathias studied naval architecture and offshore engineering in Hamburg, Germany, his second home country. He specialized at the Hamburg University of Technology in the fields of ship hydrodynamics, structural engineering and ship design.
The maritime feel of the city further kindled his interest in the marine sector. First work experiences came in the rapidly growing offshore wind industry in the north sea and specialist heavy lift applications.  

Professional Experience

Starting as project engineer for Hansa Heavy Lift, a specialized shipowner based in Hamburg, he developed project lead experience for heavy lifting operations. For a variety of clients, Mathias managed the technical scope and stakeholders for the projects from start to execution, which could take place throughout the world. The technical fields of expertise comprised planning, budgeting, structural verifications, seafastening design, CAD, hydrodynamic calculation, voyage planning and heavy lift engineering. He has also gained experience in the chartering, tendering and sales department.

After this, Mathias got more offshore experience by working as a field engineer on a construction barge for French contractor Geocean, offshore Peru. The project consisted on a tanker mooring buoy installation, with pipelaying, electrical and fiber optic cable laying, PLEM installation with spools, umbilical risers and hoses; and anchored mooring of the turret buoy.

Returning to France, he worked for Saipem in Paris as lead Transport & Installation Engineer. He worked for various offshore wind projects, such as the St Brieuc offshore substation Transport & Installation, Courseulles windfarm EPCI and the Seagreen suction jacket foundation installations in Scotland. He gained offshore experience by attending the execution phase on the S7000 vessel for St Brieuc and Seagreen.

Why offshore wind?

“Working in the offshore wind industry is a way to contribute to a more sustainable future. Besides, the industry is unique in its technical challenges, scale of construction, speed of innovation and variety of projects. It’s never the same from one day to another, one project or client to the next.

Another important factor the opportunity to work worldwide in a multi-cultural and multilingual environment. It creates strong bonds and another dimension to the work.
I believe offshore wind, may it be fixed, floating or still further developments ahead, has a bright future to which I enjoy contributing.”