Opening Session of Ocean Business 2007
Alastair MacDonald chaired the Conference. Ed Hill, Director, Corporate Services of the NIO, welcomed the attendees and explained, in very upbeat terms, the function of the Institute. Noting that recently the organisation had enjoyed significant investments, particularly in terms of a new vessel “James Cook”, that now is working on the Mid Atlantic Ridge. He mentioned that the Institute was a joint venture of NERC and the University of Southampton and provided a major resource for those working in the marine environment and in particular for the development of personnel. He extolled the growth and importance of Southampton as a port and major marine centre. This included it being the home of the Ordnance Survey and the Maritime & Coastguard Agency.
A Keynote Address had then been given by John Westwood from Douglas-Westwood Business Research and Information Services. In a very interesting presentation he gave an overview of the Global Ocean Industry Business Prospects in which he focussed due to time constraints on the energy related aspects. Macro factors like the growth of the developing countries, the changing patterns of threat (from cold war to terrorism) and the climate change influence the ocean business. Examples are the terrorism on port defence, sonar techniques and ROVs and global warming on observing techniques. Supported by graphs, he passed information on world energy consumption, were the developing countries are the driving demand and the oil reserves, concluding that the reserves are not the issue but our ability to produce. The national oil companies are of growing importance (75% of oil reserves being held by them). From the shortage of rigs (a construction aspect) to the massive aging of offshore infrastructure which involves subsea maintenance and/or decommissioning. Other graphs gave an insight in the prospects of floating production systems, subsea processing, ROV-operations.
The renewables with their various aspects were not forgotten in his speech as well as the challenge to find skilled and experienced people.
Selection of papers
Two papers were then given on the subject of deepwater positioning. This appropriately followed the message given by the Keynote speaker that the oil industry was moving to the deeper waters of the continental shelf and rise. Mark Poole, Chief Surveyor of Sonardyne stressed making use of the technology available, particularly USBL. He also noted the need to use the highest accuracy surface positioning and heading and attitude sensors. The problem of limited redundancy using USBL was identified and the need for good calibration. Gordon Johnston of Nautronix, discussed Wide-Area Subsea Positioning and besides the ongoing use of USBL and LBL he advocated the various advantages of NASNet. This involves the use of a spread-spectrum technique that had been developed by his company. BY deploying the transducers in buoys moored 100 metres off the seafloor it was possible to provide improved range and by using an array of these it was possible to provide precise positioning over a large area.
