Author: Bernadette Ballantyne

Supporter: Fugro

Deep down in the middle of the North Sea, senior inspection engineer Chris Ord is inspecting an oil platform. He views the condition of node 07A observing no gross defects or signs of damage. He then measures cathodic protection finding that at minus 940 millivolts, it has a good level of cover.

Although Chris can see the jacket and inspect its condition in great detail, he is actually hundreds of miles away at Fugro’s Remote Operations Centre in Aberdeen, with eight screens in front of him and a cup of tea on his desk. The data was being collected by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) and sent to Chris to review in real time.

“So the inspection was being carried out within one of our operations rooms, of which there are six screens for the inspector to look at and two large overview screens,” explains Chris’s supervisor Greg Dixon who is the Remote Operations Centre Superintendent. “Coming back to the Operations Centre are the ROV cameras, they have mutual PDF drawings that they can both see and highlight etc. So everything they need to communicate effectively is in front of the ROV pilots and also in front of the inspectors to enable them to conduct the inspection remotely from our remote operations centre.”

It is this kind of technological advancement is enabling work to move from some of the most inhospitable and dangerous waters on earth, to a network of warm, comfortable onshore offices around the world.

Moving Offshore Work Onshore

In the past surveying and inspection of subsea infrastructure has been carried out from a vessel offshore, with data not reaching the mainland for weeks. So, it is not just safer, it is much faster. In a recent project, Greg explains that the pilot had the ROV flying at up to four times the speed it would during a standard pipeline general visual inspection which, along with the ability to perform cloud processing in the Remote Operations Centre, meant that the offshore phase of the project was completed in 17 days rather than the forecast 25 and the processing happened immediately saving more time.As Greg points out, if your job is to review data then there is no need to be offshore in a more dangerous environment. “If your job is to look at the screen, then you will do it from onshore not traditionally offshore, where you would normally do it,” he says.

It isn’t just inspection of offshore equipment that has been moved back to the mainland. Vessels and infrastructure can be positioned, surveyed and monitored, as well as the local conditions from the seabed to the weather, examined and mapped. To do this has meant major investment in communications equipment and remote operations hardware and software.  

“Ultimately, remote operations enables us to do more intelligent things,” says Alastair McKie, Director for Remote Operations within the European African region at Fugro.

To Alastair who has spent over a decade working offshore himself as a surveyor, the benefits of moving to this way of working are obvious. “As the world goes towards remote and autonomy and computers and equipment get more intelligent we want to use the people and our employees in the best way that we can. And actually, we can do that far more effectively remotely by having our people within the one centre in one area of operations, controlling multiple vessels on multiple systems and sensors on vessels. And if we can have our people working onshore rather than offshore, then we reduce our and our clients HSE exposure. We reduce the carbon footprint of our teams moving around the world.”

The centre in Aberdeen isn’t the only one, there are seven in total, but it is the most advanced. “We have the ability to fly ROVs and control uncrewed surface vessels (USV) simultaneously from the room so up to eight ROVs at the one time,” he says. This means that there are remote surveyors, remote data processors, remote geophysicists and therefore the ability to carry out full remote inspection with video and audio communication, two way to the asset offshore enabled by a satellite connection for communication.

Safer Surveys

The most important advantage of the entire remote working strategy is that it is safer. Offshore work is highly regulated to keep people safe, and we are going to explore this more later. But there is only so much that you can control when you are in a vessel in the North Sea where waves of over 25m have been recorded. “The sea in a remote location is just inherently more dangerous than it is in an onshore location that can be controlled far easier,” says Alastair. “And if the worst thing happens, if there was to be an emergency in an onshore location, it’s far easier to deal with than it is in an offshore location.”

By moving work onshore, the team hope that the jobs in this industry will become more accessible to a diverse workforce. Someone who has first-hand experience of the difficult work life balance that working offshore entails is Ross McFarlane USV policy and public affairs advisor.

“I was at sea for a long period of time. My wife is currently at sea, she’s actually just left to go back to sea right now. And from a family point of view, we took a decision that if we were both at sea, essentially it wouldn’t work, it closes a lot of opportunities for us.

So one of them would have to not work and stay at home, which is why Ross is there while his wife is still at sea. “But that’s quite an unusual situation. Within the maritime industry globally, there’s roughly 1.2 million seafarers of which only 2% of them are women. A big part of that is in this lifestyle choice that you have to make. So, by taking the lifestyle choice out of it, it makes the industry a lot more appealing to a much broader range of people.”

Safety is on Ross’s mind too. “I’ve got the European figures in between 2011 and 2018 there was 25,614 ships involved in some sort event,” he says. “From that 230 ships were lost. There was 23,073 casualties or incidents where 665 were deemed to be very serious. And there were 7,684 persons injured and 696 fatalities from that. So, you can see that from these figures alone the dangers of going to sea are very real.

Technology Vs Regulation

Not surprisingly then, Ross is passionate about training and supporting staff in making the move from offshore to onshore. His formal role is meaning that he is working with government and industry to ensure that the regulations keep up with this remotely operated technology, which frankly they just can’t. At the top of the regulatory tree is the International Maritime Organisation – IMO, which sets the conventions that the rest of the world use for creating regulations. But with 177 members there are a lot of people to be consulted on any new rules. “What that means is, when it comes to defining legislation, there’s a lot of voices that need to be heard,” says Ross. “So, the process is quite long and drawn out in at the moment. The estimates are that there’ll be no regulations in place from the IMO until at least the end of the decade, if not later.”

But for an industry where regulations are critical, this lack of formal guidance can act as a barrier to its use. Fortunately, the UK government, through its new Maritime 2050 strategy is committed to making sure that the country can bring in new technology such as uncrewed vessels. Maritime 2050 is all about revolutionising the maritime industry and a cross industry working group involved in that examined the UK Shipping Act to determine what gaps or barriers there were to USVs working.

The government body spearheading drafting of new legislation is the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, which is a subsidiary of the Department for Transport. Its role is to ensure that vessels and their crew are safe in UK waters. Dr Katrina Kemp is the smart ships and automation policy advisor at the MCA. “One of the challenges with innovation generally, and regulation, is the pace at which we’re able to change regulation is a lot slower, than the pace at which innovation and technology changes,” she acknowledges.  “The technology and innovation that the industry is using is speeding up, the sensors are changing, the cameras are changing, the ideas are developing much, much quicker than we are able to develop the regulation. However, we don’t want to be developing regulation as a knee jerk reaction, we need to be doing it in a well thought through process to ensure the regulation we do develop is right to ensure a safe maritime environment and the safety of other people in that maritime environment.”

At the same time the MCA has to ensure that the regulation created today is it for purpose as innovation continues to throw up new technologies. The good news for companies using advanced technical methods like Fugro is that the MCA have already drafted a new workboat code which includes the use of autonomous vehicles.

New Workboat Code Drafted

“This is our first step into creating some regulations for autonomous vessels,” says Katrina.

These regulations, covering boats of up to 24m, are scheduled to be finalised in 2022, much earlier than the international standards which could be seen as a reflection on the UK’s ambition to become a global leader in the maritime sector. But before we can be a world leader there are some tricky regulatory challenges to contend with. “The maritime regulations are currently written with people in mind, they are there to protect the people either on board the vessel, or assuming that there is a person that can look after the vessel. So, to allow autonomous ships to operate, we need to identify what are the barriers in those regulations. So for example, in the Convention for Safety of Life at Sea of 1974, there are requirements to carry life-saving equipment, because there are people on board that require life-saving equipment if there’s a problem. However, for an autonomous vessel, do we really need it to be carrying additional equipment that could potentially be an environmental hazard if there is no one on board that needs it?

Another issue is that on a crewed vessel, ultimate responsibility lies with the captain – a term known in the maritime industry as “master’s responsibility”. But what happens when there isn’t a master onboard? Under the current system if there’s a collision at sea, or if there’s any kind of violations of regulations, when the vessel comes into port, the vessel will be arrested. And the master will be taken into custody. That then encourages the company to define why that happened and follow the proper legal process. If you then apply that to a USV operated from a remote operations centre when the vessel comes into port there’s nobody there to arrest. “In terms of The Master, this is one of the questions that we will have international discussions about and we’re having conversations about in terms of our drafting of the workboat code,” explains Katrina “And we have different ideas. So, for example, if we can say that a master who is a person in command of a ship, it doesn’t say whether that person has to be on the ship. It just says that a master is in command. So that could work in our favour and we could use it. But we still need to have that conversation with a lawyer to ensure that actually our interpretation is actually a suitable interpretation.”

Another area that the new regulations will need to consider is what is expected of the remote operations centre for USVs. “So, for remote operators in a remote operations centre, what we would expect is that they have the same equipment or the same information they would have as if they were standing on the bridge of that vessel looking out during a normal watchkeeping role,” says Katrina. “So we have to make sure that how we word that in the workboat code gives them the direction of what they need, so that you have cameras that provide you visual feedback or you have sensors that give you additional information. You have potentially radar or other feedback, and data. But the challenge we have is making sure that we don’t confine ourselves to our current understanding of technology. We need to make sure that we give them the flexibility to develop as technology develops, because it’s developing very, very quickly.”

Defining Autonomous Vessels

One of the biggest challenges internationally is how to define an autonomous vessel. So far a set of four high level definitions has been created, but solely for the purpose of reviewing the regulations to give some structure for how to identify the issues. The first degree is a normal vessel but with additional decision support systems. So extra sensors, extra cameras and other information that can support the seafarer during the role. The second is a remotely operated vessel with persons on board, they might be on board to maintain engines to monitor cargo for any other reason. The third degree is a remotely operated vessel with no persons on board. And then the fourth degree is a fully autonomous vessel.

“We are all fully aware that they may not be the perfect answer for how we define autonomy in the future. But it at least gives us a starting point from which to frame the questions and the conversations going forward,” says Katrina.

Of course all of these new procedures and requirements create another massive challenge in itself – training. When it comes to ROV or USV operators, Ross McFarlane says they need to learn to use ‘sen-sors’, rather than their ‘sen-ses’. “In order to prepare people, we need to teach them how to use the sensors and the data that we can provide them rather than the senses that feel on touch, essentially. And I think one of one of the key aspects that’s going to be part of this is this, the use of simulators,” he says.

Unlike offshore work which can’t be 100 percent replicated in a simulator the new methods can be making sure that training is more accurate, and it can go even further, putting operators through a gauntlet known as ‘above real-time training’. “You take someone you train them up to everyday operational standard. And then you start throwing them into all sorts of crazy situations you start removing sensors from them, you put them in situations where they would never have experienced before.”

A concept first pioneered by NASA.

Transforming the Industry

As Katrina explained technology is moving faster than regulation and coming soon is a new piece of kit that could change the way that offshore work is carried out forever. The Sea Kit is an uncrewed surface vessel just over two metres wide and 12m long. It weighs 12 tonnes and is capable of a maximum speed of around six knots. “The main component, the most important one is the vessel of course, because that is the host for the whole solution,” says Ivar de Josselin de Jong, Global Director for Remote Inspection Solutions at Fugro. “It can stay out offshore for close to 150 days at low speed at around three knots.”

Endurance here is calculated without an ROV payload. With continuous ROV operations you obviously consume a lot more energy, a lot more fuel. So that limits the endurance to less than 30 days but as the vessel is equipped with a couple of large battery packs and a generator which is charging these battery packs, that’s all been done with a fuel tank of 2000 litres.

“This vessel is hosting a remotely operated vehicle, an ROV, an underwater robot, which is connected to the vessel with an umbilical and this can be launched when the vessel is close to an asset and that can be a pipeline or an offshore jacket, but also a wind turbine or a substation for that matter, even turbines can be connected to,” says Ivar explaining that it is the ROV that actually undertakes the inspection using an array of sensors as Greg in the operations centre already explained.

“This data is collected, but obviously you need software to process this data to visualise it for clients. To deliver it to clients. So, that is the third main pillar, the data acquisition software.”

And then, as this vessel will be roaming the seas, cutting a lonely path through the waves far away from any communications infrastructure, it needs a satellite uplink. “So, there is a big satellite dome on the back of the vessel and all the information which is going to the vessel also goes through the satellite connection to our remote operation centre,” says Ivar.

The vessel should be capable of operating up to state four on the Douglas Sea Scale, moderate conditions with a wave height of up to 2.5m. In the Middle East, this would mean a utilisation of over 95%, but somewhere like the North Sea it would be less. A larger Sea Kit however would operate in more challenging conditions and plans are in place to create a 24m vehicle with a bigger ROV. The potential uses are vast. “We are also already anticipating using the Sea Kit for remote construction support activities. And then you can think about services in relation to cable lay, pre-lay surveys, lay support and post-lay surveys,” says Ivar. “The vessel is also capable of hosting geophysical sensors with which we can acquire hydrographic data or seismic data for the site investigation phase of the asset lifetime.”

The first vessel is being manufactured right now and is an example of how fast the sector is developing new technology.With the right skills and training, state of the art equipment, and an appropriate legislative framework, operations in the maritime environment are set to go from strength to strength.