Modern active acoustic multibeam sonars have the last 1.5 years achieved amajor breakthrough in terms of performance, physical size, power consumption, uplink flexibility, processing and not least price. This now allows the tool tobe used in a much wider context during arctic subsea hydro carbonate (Oil/gas)detection, quantification and visualization. As the new generation sonar is soflexible it will easily integrate to any platform, AUV, ROV, Gliders, permanentinstallation, ship borne etc. The multibeam sonar will be capable of monitoringlarger areas and perform various tasks in an arctic oil explorationsetting.
Active acoustics can be used for various applications such as A) Reservoirfault monitoring, a good example of such an event was the Frade field spillNovember last year, under ice this would have been disastrous B) Natural seeps, this is instrumental to monitor during exploration but also during operation ofthe field C) Leakage detection on infra structure, naturally this is of greatconcern to have real time detection of leakages from critical infra structureD) Oil spill response, detection of hydro carbonate suspended in the watercolumn as well as under the ice, on seafloor E) Dispersant mixing efficiency, real time 3D monitoring of the mixing process during application of dispersantF) Major events such as the deep water horizon it is important to be able tomonitor hydro carbonate in the water column Results, Observations, andConclusions: Active acoustic test data will be shown, this will be a mix ofreal offshore data as well as laboratory based data sets. Examples of datarelevant to all the application areas described will be given Significance ofSubject Matter: Obviously those applications are highly relevant for the articexploration area.
