Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) called “microsubs” are becoming more popular within the oil and gas industry, according to BP (London, United Kingdom), which posted a report in early July about the company’s research on using AUVs to record detailed photos and information about the underwater environment.
"We're adapting a microsub to perform environmental surveying that would normally be done at considerable cost using large-scale AUVs or remotely operated vehicles," says Joe Little, a technology principal on BP's digital innovation team.
The report says these microsubs are only 50-cm long and cost as little as $7,000, each.
BP is working with manufacturer Planet Ocean (Camberley, United Kingdom), the Marine Robotics Innovation Centre at the UK's National Oceanography Centre (Southampton, United Kingdom), and the Scottish Association of Marine Science (Oban, Scotland) to optimize the microsub technology before starting the first trial run in the North Sea in December 2016.
The company plans to use the microsubs to patrol its subsea infrastructure, such as pipelines, to provide an early warning of any potential problems.
"When you have numerous units working intelligently, the speed of work and the volume of data and information you get is very impressive," says Peter Collinson, BP's global environmental response expert and Little's partner on the project.
If the trials are successful, BP plans to roll out a fleet of microsubs for environmental and operational monitoring and also crisis response planning. That process could start as soon as 2017.
The report says the miniature size of the microsubs allows BP to explore previously inaccessible areas such as shallow water, wrecks, and reefs, and they can be used to pinpoint pipeline corrosion or potential leaks.
"There are a lot of different ways we could deploy them: crates on the seabed, platforms, the shoreline, helicopters—we're even looking into dropping them from drones," Little says.
Microsubs have less space for sensors, so the image quality from the microsubs is not as good as it typically is with larger machines. However, the microsubs should more than make up for that with a higher overall quantity of data, the report says.
"As microsubs go up and down alongside our pipelines, we won't get high-definition video, but we will get very sensitive hydrocarbon and possible methane readings," Collinson says. "We can tell if there's any hydrocarbon in proximity to our pipeline, consistently, and at a phenomenally low cost."