Saturation diving has been developed over the past several years as a useful method to allow divers to spend a significant amount of working time in deep water.
It is now practical for divers to work 6 to 8 hour shifts each day on the bottom in order to complete difficult and time consuming tasks. When the job is completed they can decompress slowly and return to the surface.
In a recent application six (6) divers accomplished the task of connecting five small flanged pipelines to a subsea wellhead in water over 340 feet deep. The job required 42 hours bottom time and was completed in five (5) days. Conventional techniques would have cost approximately four times as much, considering the cost of both diving and floating support equipment, and would have involved considerably greater risk to the safety of the divers.
Underwater pipeline welding is another excellent application of saturation diving due to the amount of time required for joint line-up, joint preparation and weld metal deposition.
In most diving projects which require several consecutive hours of working time in fairly deep water, saturation diving should be considered as a potentially economical method of performing the work.
Although somewhat sophisticated, saturation diving should no longer be considered as experimental. Saturation diving is a practical and economical commercial tool which is available NOW.
As the oil industry ventures into deeper waters, there is an ever increasing need for man to perform useful work under the sea. Utilizing conventional, surface oriented diving techniques, divers must remain on the bottom shorter and shorter times as the depths increase. In addition to this shorter time, the deeper water makes each dive more expensive. It is apparent, therefore, that each minute spent on the bottom is costing the customer more money.
Since today's offshore diving industry exists primarily to service the oil and gas industry, competition, along with new technology, has brought us saturation diving. It is the intent of this paper to describe the general principles of saturation diving and to demonstrate that saturation diving is a proven, useful, and economical tool for the offshore oil and gas industry.
The following is a brief explanation of the principles o£ saturation diving for those who are not familiar with the techniques:
Under normal atmospheric conditions, a man's system has certain amounts of inert gas absorbed his blood and tissues. This seldom causes problems as long as the surrounding pressure does not change appreciably.
