HOUSTON—The downturn may have pushed oil and gas companies closer to technology as they move toward more cost-effective and operationally efficient subsea developments. But robotics could help lead to further improvements.

The focus of marine robotics in the subsea environment has expanded beyond seafloor mapping for high-resolution maps, James Bellingham, founding director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Center for Marine Robotics, told SEN on the sidelines of CERAWeek by IHS Markit. Now the industry is seeing the gradual opening of new markets for autonomous, or untethered, systems to inspect subsea infrastructure, determine whether equipment is working properly, find leaks and detect changing subsea conditions.

For the oceanographic community, untethered ROVs enable travel to places that might have been difficult to get to otherwise to obtain data from the seafloor. It also eliminates the need for a ship as the vehicle is launched from the shore.

“This matters a lot because your economics are really driven by the ship for most robotics systems,” among other factors, Bellingham said while presenting “Robots, Data & Autonomy: The Subsea Revolution” during CERAWeek’s inaugural technology-focused Agora program. Today AUVs are used to quickly collect high-quality data for high-resolution deepwater surveys, but this requires a vessel. “Looking five years out, the question is, ‘How do you remove the ship?’” dropping the cost of seafloor surveying.

The lower commodity price environment has put technology at the forefront of many oil and gas companies’ agendas to help bring down costs associated with traditionally high-cost offshore developments. Like other parts of the industry, providers of robotics such as ROVs saw vessel utilization fall as deepwater vessel activity, particularly floaters, dropped. But slowly improving offshore market conditions coupled with the push for sustainable cost savings, increased efficiency and technology that accomplishes both could steer operators of subsea developments closer to robotics.

Meanwhile, innovation continues, including in the area of powering untethered vehicles.

“We’re figuring out how to scavenge energy from the ocean environment,” said Bellingham, noting this includes wind, solar and wave energy.

He highlighted the Wave Glider, an unmanned, remotely piloted marine AUV that is powered by waves. The hybrid sea surface and underwater vehicle, which collects and transmits data in real time, was developed a few years ago by Liquids Robotics Inc., now a Boeing Co., and Schlumberger. Its boards, which resemble Venetian blinds, hang below the surfboard and convert wave power to move the vessel.

“The Wave Glider system is now considered a proven system, and people now design entire observation strategies around using a little vehicle with a Venetian binder instead of putting together a whole mooring, which might be a million-dollar mooring,” Bellingham told SEN.

Besides wave-powered systems, there are also systems that power themselves off thermal differences in the ocean, he explained, while another is basically a biofuel cell that generates small amounts of electricity from microbial communities in the seafloor. One group has even figured out how to cultivate energy from these microbial communities into a battery to increase power output, he said. All of this creates the ability to charge robots at docking stations on the seafloor.

“These are all kind of crazy things that 10 years ago I think most of us in the robotics community wouldn’t have believed were going to exist,” Bellingham said. “Now they are actually out there operating. A combination of them gives you the ability to build a large system in the ocean environment.”

Bellingham shared the story of how a field program offshore California focused on measuring ocean conditions and currents used 20 robotic systems—some with lots of sensors and other slower systems with longer endurances—taking more measurements in two weeks than the rest of the entire oceanographic fleet combined in a year.

However, being near existing infrastructure has its advantages.

“In the oil and gas field we have a lot of power. The whole thing is basically wired, so why wouldn’t you take advantage of that with your underwater vehicles,” he said. “If your vehicle can get close to wired infrastructure, it can effectively become a tethered vehicle but tethered with an optical link rather than a hard physical link. That in turn opens up the opportunities for these resident platforms in the ocean.”

Bellingham agrees that the focus on technology could put robotics in the spotlight.

“There are other applications where you begin to join the surface platforms to undersea platforms, and that’s kind of the frontier, where we start using [vehicles] synergistically. … In the scientific industry, we’ve been doing this for a while,” he said. But moving deeper into oil and gas, after demonstrating the potential of robotics through prototypes and creating a real system, “we have to have a better understanding of the market and mesh it with emerging needs, infrastructure and the philosophy of offshore oil and gas.”

—Velda Addison

Offshore