Successful Deep Water Trials Alistar 3000

Further to a series of demonstrations conducted offshore Toulon, France, in December 2005 and March 2006, ECA has just completed 10-day deep water trials of Alistar 3000 AUV in GoM (Gulf of Mexico) for BP America Production Company. This trial was carried out as part of the BP Exploration and Production Technology Group field trial programme. Alistar 3000 is an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) able to carry out pre-programmed inspection missions in deep water without need of a physical link to the surface. The deep water trials took place with the local support of ECA's partner in the USA, Harvey Lynch Inc. The vehicle was launched from an Oceaneering vessel hired by BP.



Between 6 and 15 July 2006, ALISTAR 3000 executed numerous missions at 4450ft on a 9"x13" pipe-in-pipe flowline around BP's King Field, confirming the vehicles capabilities of:

• accurate repositioning close to seabed after the descent phase


• keeping an acoustic supervision from the surface throughout the mission


• validating a sophisticated mission management system


• finding and 'locking' onto a pipeline after a searching phase


• tracking and closely following a pipeline between 1 and 2m above the pipe enabling recording of high quality video images of the pipeline


• detecting and carrying out close inspection of an anomaly using dedicated patterns


• safe recovery to the surface

These successful first trials of Alistar 3000 in a real deep water offshore environment have brought to ECA a highly valuable knowledge of the vehicle capabilities in operational conditions.