In Oslo, Norway’s Frogen Park stands a bronze statue by the famed sculptor Gustav Viegland that is widely known as “Man fighting children,” but its official name is No. 27: Man chasing four geniuses. It depicts a man in a wild struggle with four babies. For the full effect, I suggest a Google search.

I visited the park and saw the statue while participating in a press tour of Norway’s subsea industry. Once past the initial shock of a naked metal man punting an infant across the park’s highly manicured lawn, I was struck with how it seemed a fitting metaphor to the internal struggle affecting the subsea industry. Innovation, Standardization, Cost and Efficiency could easily be the names of the four.

To a certain extent, every engineer could be considered an artist and vice versa. Figuring out how the puzzle pieces of an invention fit together to meet the desired result—be it a pretty picture or a game-changing subsea power supply system—is most definitely an art form.

It is the process of fitting the pieces together that introduces madness. Countless beautiful solutions have met brutal deaths as the crushing weight of worldly concerns like money, materials and time take their toll. Balancing the artist’s need to innovate with the investor’s need for fiscal restraint is a cumbersome—but necessary—act.

Listening to the speakers at the recent Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) and Underwater Technology Conference (UTC) certainly brought that message home. However, one could also hear the enthusiasm in the voices of each to tackle the tough challenge of achieving balance.

Of the many worthy subsea technology development projects that are underway, two stood out for their unique use of a traditional tool in a nontraditional way.

Johan Slätte of Norway’s DNV GL presented a paper on the last day of OTC about the technical and economic feasibility of subsea water injection pumping using wind power. A few weeks later, the company announced the launch of a joint industry project to study the new concept of combining mature water injection technology with the latest developments in wind power to achieve cost-effective EOR. The concept, according to a release, intends to integrate the compressor and water treatment equipment into the substructure of a floating wind turbine.

At UTC, the U.K.’s Ocean Resources presented its Sea Commander as one option for powering subsea fields. The Sea Commander is a buoy-based high-integrity system that provides local control, monitoring, chemical injection, power supply or other services to a remote subsea development. The system is designed to replace the conventional umbilical control link between an offshore production platform, onshore terminal or subsea production facilities.

The East Spar control buoy off the northwestern coast of Australia and a second control buoy for 10 subsea wells in the E-M field offshore South Africa are two examples of the company’s work.

Using windmills and buoys to help produce oil and gas is almost as crazy as thinking we can produce oil and gas from thousands of meters below the water on the seafloor. It’s a good thing the industry is full of great thinkers—touched or not—with the gift of madness.

Offshore