Page 30: of Offshore Engineer Magazine (Nov/Dec 2019)

Exploration Outlook

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FEATURE Subsea sors. Like Shand, however, processing the data gathered by same system for deployment in the Caspian Sea in Azer- this approach has been a challenge. baijan for inspection of hundreds of kilometers of shallow water pipelines (12-25m water depth). “The offshore in-

Going without a manned dustry is on the cusp of great change as the use of USVs surface vessel increases and functionalities develop. It’s challenging the

Yet, this method still requires use of a manned support use of manned vessels for routine inspections,” Primeau vessel. So, operators have been trailing use of USVs for says. “The USV is becoming a standard tool for perform- pipeline inspection. Earlier this year (2019), BP tried pipe- ing high resolution seabed surveys and it’s also a gateway line inspection using an XOCEAN XO-450 USV – a ? rst for developing complementary underwater systems, such for the North Sea. Deploying the USV out of Peterhead, as the integration of ROVs and AUVs.” in northeast Scotland, BP surveyed a shallow water section Shell’s also been looking at USVs, Shand says, testing an of the 30in abandoned Miller export pipeline. On a sec- XOCEAN XO-450 along the coast north of Aberdeen on ond run, from just 2.5m water depth to 40m depth over a short trial survey in 2019. Here, while data and band- a 4.75km section of pipeline, the USV was set up with an width will be a challenge, the roll-out of 5G and use of the

R2Sonics Dual Head multibeam system, Valeport SWiFT cloud will help, opening the door to real-time inspection sound velocity pro? ler and Applanix POSMV OceanMas- and analysis, he says. ter for vehicle heading, attitude, heave and velocity. Equinor has also been using USVs for pipeline survey. In

Success on the Miller project led BP to commission the September 2019, XOCEAN completed pipeline surveys

Source: DeepOcean

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