Marine Technology Reporter Blogs - anchoring

The C-Worker is an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) designed for offshore services in the O&G industry. The multi-role offshore USV is designed to conduct subsea positioning, surveying and environmental monitoring without the need of a ship on station or seabed anchoring. Autonomous Surface Vehicles Ltd (ASV Ltd) is a UK company and part of Global Fusion, a privately owned international marine services group based in Lafayette, Louisiana, USA. The small robust design incorporates an aluminum self-righting hull that makes the vehicle suitable for harsh ocean environments. At only 5.85 meters in length, a beam of 2.2 meters and a height of 4.75 meter with its mast extended, this USV is a much cheaper and compact option for some offshore jobs that today are done by much larger vessels.

Among the many challenges facing E&P in the Brazilian deepwater pre-salt plays, is that of anchoring the flowlines, platforms, FPSOs and even buoys to the seabed which can be over 2000 meters deep. Petrobras has developed a simple and efficient method of doing this through the Torpedo Pile.In the case of the deepwater pre-salt plays in Brazil, specially at the Santos Basin, the distance from land to some of the proven plays like Tupi and Iara, which are around 300km from shore and pose complex logistics problems even on surface structures. Challenges, such as how to anchor a deepwater rig or FPSO to the seabed 2,200 meters down must be resolved. It is a long distance for anchors to travel, normally four or more anchors are used and these anchors need to be aligned.