Engineering capacity and a lack of standardization are serious challenges to the subsea industry, says a keynote speaker at this week's UTC in Bergen.
Werner Menz, president subsea controls in newly formed joint venture OneSubsea, says: "I believe that the major challenges lie in the area of engineering capacity and our ability to enhance recovery of reservoirs.
"We need to ask ourselves why a solution that is good enough on one project is not useable on another one. To be clear, I am not talking about design features – my point is more towards standard requirements in Materials, Welding, Quality and Documentation. There are a couple of initiatives that start to tackle this but we have a long way to go."
He says for the industry to be successful in increasing recovery from existing and new fields, it will need to be smarter, rather than bigger.
He thinks the real challenge for the industry will come when more and more product hits the seafloor. This is a development that will require a more integrated approach to data handling, communication, surveillance and monitoring.
"the complexity of seabed instruments will increase and the analysis of all that data will move from display/alarm only to more sophisticated management tools that provide guidance, solutions and automation," says Menz.
"Another area is well intervention and how we can access remote wells more efficient than today because clearly a part of the increased recovery comes from being able to access and work over the wells."
OneSubsea is the newly formed joint venture between Cameron and Schlumberger.
UTC (Underwater Technology Conference) is on June 19-20 this week.