Advanced monitoring of marine infrastructure for decommissioning

Many oil and gas fields are reaching the end of their lives. It is estimated that over 50 of the 475 structures that eventually will have to be decommissioned will be decommissioned by 2018. While most structures will be removed entirely, some larger platforms and pipelines currently cannot be removed without causing serious environmental harm. The structures that remain in place are cleaned and made safe and then they are regularly monitored by the oil and gas company that owns them to ensure that they are not causing any adverse impacts on the environment. Currently this monitoring is done using a survey ship, which at tens of thousands of pounds a day, becomes very expensive. This is not conducive to regular monitoring, which in turn increases the risks of any impacts going undetected.
This project aims to introduce a new approach for monitoring of decommissioned structures - autonomous submarines. These vehicles are becoming more widely adopted by industry. It has been demonstrated that these vehicles can be launched from shore and carry out complex missions underwater, collecting information on the seabed type and biological environment, while also monitoring pollution. However, so far they have not yet been applied to decommissioning and existing sensors and protocols need to be reconfigured to collect the data that is required for environmental monitoring around decommissioned structures. Working with our project partners, Shell, BP, BEIS, Gardline and SeeByte, this project will address these challenges and develop approaches for collection of appropriate monitoring data to regularly assess the impact of decommissioned structures with autonomous vehicle. The approaches will be integrated within the standard practices of oil companies to ensure that they are realistic and widely adopted for monitoring. The integration of this new information with existing baseline information on the areas will also be considered. This will ultimately reduce the costs associated with monitoring and improve the quality and quantity of data that can be obtained, which will reduce the risk of environmental damage from decommissioned structures.

Oil companies including the project partners, Shell and BP, will benefit from the project by developing a novel low-cost but rigorous monitoring strategy for its decommissioned assets. This will greatly reduce the cost of monitoring, particularly if multiple fields can be assessed at once. The approaches developed during this project will potentially allow industry consortia to be formed to share the cost of monitoring sites, further reducing the financial burden on individual companies.
Regulators and policy makers will benefit from the project as it will provide a practical solution for regular industry environmental monitoring to detect impacts, which is a critical part of the regulatory approach for dealing with derogation cases. The approaches developed by this project could also be used for compliance monitoring, enforcement and facilitate emergency response.
The project will provide an industry approved roadmap to develop existing and novel technologies with a guaranteed market. These technologies and expertise in application will be based in the UK and will provide potential economic benefits for the country and a source of foreign income as decommissioning becomes necessary in other jurisdictions. Survey and data-acquisition companies will benefit from the project by being able to proactively adopt new approaches as they are demanded by the oil companies and sell the required services and technologies.
Industrial environmental management and applied science will be informed by more data, allowing more effective management and study of the impacts of decommissioned infrastructure with greater spatial and temporal resolution than before. In addition, standard approaches using high-quality autonomous systems facilitate comparisons between and within projects, enhancing scientific understanding and improving management. The wider community will benefit from improvements in environmental monitoring and reduced risk of environmental impacts from decommissioned infrastructure.