Page 28: of Offshore Engineer Magazine (Nov/Dec 2019)

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FEATURE Subsea is a tangible bonus. In 2018, Shell ran a new survey us- what’s going on, such as scoring on the top of a pipe from ing DeepOcean’s “Fast Digital Imaging Service”. This ? shing interference,” he says. involved a Kyst Design Superior ROV, with auto track- Combined with high-resolution multibeam bathym- ing capability, operated from the Edda Flora vessel on etry data, these UHD photos offer a completely new way a 45-day nonstop campaign, starting in September of review incidents and anomalies, through 3D mesh 2018. The Superior was fitted with Teledyne dual head models and color point clouds, with automatic com- multi-beam echo sounders, Edgetech side scan sonar parison of annual survey data sets now possible, he says. and sub bottom profiler, pipetracker, a CathX ultra- “These data sets are creating quite a stir,” says Shand. “It’s high definition (UHD) cameras (x3) and high speci- a radical change.” fication inertial navigation. An ability to launch the

Data driving decisions vessel in up to 4.5-meter seas meant work could be

With this capability, remediation can also be faster. started earlier in the season and run late into Autumn, says Shand, with speeds of 5kt in acoustic mode and For example, on discovering a new pipeline free span,

Shell was able to export the muiltbeam data and pass it 3.5-4kt for pipeline inspection. to the contractor – Van Oord – who were able to accu-

Furthermore, having the side scan sonar meant the ves- rately calculate the amount of rock needed. What’s more, sel could break out of the pipeline survey to execute “ad- hoc ? y-by jobs”, such as a jack up rig site survey in the pipeline engineers now have a better ability to compare

Shearwater ? eld, says Shand. But, the biggest bene? t was legacy ‘as-built’ information, with recently “as-found” the UHD stills created by the CathX system, that enabled multibeam data.

This year [2019], Shell went back out again, this time “incredible detail”. “When you zoom in, you presented with sub-centimeter detail and can make inferences about with Reach Subsea using the Surveyor Interceptor vehicle,

Boulder Kissing Pipe from Shell

Source: Shell 28 OFFSHORE ENGINEER OEDIGITAL.COM