Marine Construction

We will be rolling out our initial capabilities in support of marine construction survey services in the offshore oil and gas sector in the spring of 2007. Please come back for an updated discussion on our Marine Construction services offered. For now, we offer a basic introduction on the use of inertial to speed up operations in offshore construction operations:

Why change what is currently working offshore?

Most current subsea marine construction surveys still use conventional acoustic positioning techniques. We are beginning to see some inclusion of inertial instruments within some of the applications discussed below but most operations use techniques that are basically the same as those used 20 years ago. These conventional acoustic positioning systems provide the required positioning accuracy, but consume far too much operational time – they cost too much in Boat and ROV time.

Deepwater marine construction survey methodologies have reached a plateau. The repeatability of such operations observed in recent years highlights the mature nature of the technology and procedures. Mistakes are still made and budgets are still impacted by procedural, equipment and operational failures. Few can argue about the industries ability to complete deepwater marine construction survey tasks – the problem is not the quality, or the capability to complete the task – but the cost to the overall project.

Zupt’s capabilities will significantly reduce vessel and ROV time consumed to provide precise relative and absolute deepwater positioning for many marine construction activities.

Our tools bring major cost savings in many marine construction applications. A few examples being:

• Metrology – providing repeatable, reliable positioning data while consuming minimal ROV/spread time. A local, relative positioning problem well suited to our aided inertial solution.
• Local field development positioning - 300m x 300m subsea infrastructure relative installation – Zupt significantly reduces the operational time currently consumed to deploy and calibrate large LBL arrays while we also reduce the LBL beacon count significantly.
• Wide area deepwater absolute positioning – 3,000m x 3,000m field wide control with significantly reduced acoustic observation sets. For these operations we reduce Vessel/ROV spread time consumed due to less hardware deployed on the seabed. Such an application is deepwater permanent suction mooring installations.
• Deepwater pipeline “as built” survey – improving the survey deliverable from USBL systems by aiding with an inertial observation set – no need for LBL.
• Increases in update rate and quality of positioning and attitude for such ROV based tasks as bathymetry (multibeam), visualization and automation.

Significant cost savings can be achieved through the use of our technology. If we look at the example of a single multi-well field development the following are conservative estimates of costs savings:

Some very simple assumptions – Near field/Far field array installations for local subsea field installations in a large field development program. Multiple frame set, array installation and calibration at 4 locations:

A very conservative estimate of savings = $390K on a single job

Zupt brings both the operational knowledge and technical expertise to allow state of the art technical solutions to significantly reduce the operational time consumed for these tasks.

An example of some subsea positioning tasks and the accuracy required are:

The water depths for these operations vary from shallow water shelf operations (200m) to deep frontier locations (4000m).

Zupt’s capabilities in this market are primarily ROV based and as such provide the capability to measure distances and angles for many subsea marine construction tasks.

This subsea aided inertial product provides very precise, high update rate real time and post processed position, heading and attitude data. These capabilities have been designed and constructed to survive the offshore environment and work in the “real world” of daily operations – such as limited bandwidth ROV communications.

Please come take another look at this page in the near future for a more detailed discussion of our capabilities.