Collecting data is essential to designing, building, operating and maintaining any kind of asset in the offshore energy industry, and although unmanned surface vessels (USVs) are still an emerging technology, there has been significant growth in recent months in the number and type of operations completed by them, with energy majors such as Equinor, and developers such as Ørsted, increasingly involved in testing them. Working with USV developers including Sea-Kit and XOcean, Equinor first trialled USVs in the North Sea offshore oil and gas market in 2019. For a conventional pipeline inspection project, it noted, a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) support vessel with around 50 people on board would be required. In contrast, for an unmanned pipeline inspection, no vessels or humans at sea would be required. Moreover, a manned vessel would have fuel consumption 12 m~3 per day, whereas the fuel consumption of an unmanned unit would be less than 0.15 m~3 - a 99% improvement.
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