Record Year for PanGeo Subsea's Acoustic Corer

Canadian marine robotics firm Kraken Robotics said Friday that its PanGeo Subsea was celebrating a record year of contracts valued over $8 million for its Acoustic Corer.

Kraken said PanGeo Subsea was near completion of Acoustic Corer ("AC") contracts valued at over $8 million in 2022, so far.

"This has been the AC's busiest year since its commercialization in 2011, supporting surveys in the US, North and Baltic Seas," Kraken Robotics said.

Earlier this year, PanGeo was awarded a $5 million contract in the US to support a major oil platform decommissioning survey. 

The scope of work was to acquire 63 overlapping acoustic cores providing 100% coverage of the site. The 63 individual cores were migrated into a single high-resolution 3D acoustic volumetric data set, identifying buried infrastructure at depths up to 60 meters below the mudline. Following the completion of the US project, the AC was mobilized to a site in the Dutch North Sea, where it surveyed seven locations for a gas development, Kraken Robotics said.

This survey was to locate and image buried boulders greater than 0.5 meters within the sub-seabed and map the depth of lithological boundaries, correlating them with geotechnical properties. The AC is currently deployed to the Baltic Sea, surveying 30 locations at a wind farm off the Polish coast. 

The region is dominated by a complex seabed with glacial till outcroppings, providing a challenge for foundation designs, Kraken says.

Here, the AC will locate buried anomalies, including boulders, and chart lithological boundaries to support the design and subsequent safe installation of foundations, Kraken Robotics says.

These projects, Kraken says, follow PanGeo's completion of an AC software enhancement program resulting in a 40% reduced survey time. PanGeo also integrated a parametric chirp sensor to further define lithological boundaries and interpolate geotechnical properties in the data. Together the upgrades now enable anomaly identification up to 60 meters below the seabed, depending on seabed characteristics and complexity, the company says.

“We are very pleased to see such high utilization of the AC “, says Moya Cahill, CEO of PanGeo Subsea. “With our most recent upgrades, we continue to offer more value to our clients as faster scan times not only offer cost savings, but also help reduce our carbon footprint.”