Norwegian oil and gas company Vår Energi has contracted technology supplier Vissim to implement upgraded oil spill detection technology at its offshore installations in Norway.
Vissim will provide a new and upgraded oil spill detection solution for the Balder FPSO and the Ringhorne processing platform.
“We are installing a cost effective solution, reusing hardware already installed, that significantly enhances the quality of the oil spill monitoring,” says Håvard Odden, director of Vissim’s North Sea operations.
The regulatory requirement for oil spill monitoring and detection is that operators need to have detection technologies that combined make them independent of weather conditions.
"All installations on the Norwegian continental shelf are equipped with radar technology for vessel tracking. The two-in-one solution from Vissim allows both vessel tracking and oil spill detection using the same radar. One general challenge with radar-based oil spill detection systems is that the image processing technology generates false alarms which operators must monitor and respond to manually. Such false alarms can be caused by heavy rain, vessel wake and other phenomena, Vissim said.
According to Vissim, the new solution from took 1.5 years to develop and is based on input from operators on the Norwegian continental shelf.
"The radar-based solution uses upgraded image processing technology to detect even more, but capitalizes on machine learning to teach the system what needs to be responded to and what should be ignored," Vissim said.
“The new system has much higher sensitivity which means that it will detect smaller oil spills. It capitalizes on machine learning and artificial intelligence, which means that the amount of false alarms will drastically decrease which in turn means less stress on operators. This increases the reliability of the oil spill detection system while it also reduces operators’ costs,” adds Håvard Odden.