CLEAN SEA (Continuous Long-term Environmental and Asset iNtegrity monitoring at SEA) is the concept of an innovative robotic system making possible the execution of asset integrity and environmental monitoring tasks around oil & gas installations by means of a commercial Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) properly upgraded with key enabling technologies.
The concept is based on the original and distinctive idea of an autonomous mobile robot capable to support a custom-designed mission payload, arranged in modular and interchangeable pods. Reference missions addressed by the project include:
environmental monitoring tasks, during all phases of the field development: prior to any activity taking place (environmental baseline monitoring); during exploration and production activities, in proximity of offshore infrastructures (platforms, FPSO, SPS, pipelines etc.) (environmental impact monitoring); in the event of significant incidents, to record the immediate effects of the incident and environmental recovery (post-incident monitoring);
general oil spill detection tasks (pre-planned paths, along flowlines, around SPS templates and manifolds, verification of occurrence of situations for which mobilization of a ROV vessel is required);
detection and localization of hydrocarbon leakages from flowlines;
Visual inspection tasks of SPS structures, manifolds and associated equipment.
This paper provides a comprehensive technical overview of the concept. Results of the first phase of demonstration tests are also presented and discussed.
