Offshore in depth

Editor’s note:  This month’s Offshore column is a guest effort, featuring an interview conducted by industry veteran Don Francis with Seanic Ocean Systems President Tom Ayars.

Tom Ayars has had a unique vantage point within the deepwater industry. As a former diver, he’s seen deepwater operations, from the surface to as far down as 1,000 ft. Ayars has pretty much retired from his role as one of the original human ROVs, and is now running a company that provides tooling for ROV interfaces to handle tough jobs offshore.

Ayars is president of Seanic Ocean Systems, formerly known as Mako Deepwater Inc. The company was formed, he said, to address the growing demand for simple, rugged and reliable subsea tooling for remote intervention. He has assembled a veteran team of skilled specialists with years of hands-on experience in disciplines that include diving, ROV manufacturing, ROV operations, intervention tooling and heavy fabrication.

We recently visited with Ayars to hear about the changes that he has seen in the offshore industry, particularly in terms of ROVs, their capabilities, and what the future holds for them.

World Oil: How has the ROV industry changed?

Tom Ayars: Well in the early ’70s, ROVs didn’t even exist. They were being co-developed with a few commercial companies and the military. In the late ’70s, ROVs just started creeping into the industry, and they were really not much more than an eyeball—just an observation pod, really. They hadn’t thought out handling systems, the current issues and the power issues. They were all-electric. And then, over time, a bunch of different people came out with their ideas of what the ROV should be able to do, and look like, and work around some of the challenges that they had.

And as that technology started to develop, and the ROVs got to be more proficient, we had a chicken-and-egg kind of scenario that was unfolding. Most of the hardware that was on the bottom was not ROV-friendly. So, even though you had ROVs that were sort of moving forward and had the manipulators that they had—that they were able to kind of steal from the aerospace industry and the automotive manufacturing business, where they had robotics. That was getting incorporated into the units. But the hardware down there didn’t lend itself to a robotic type of application.

So divers continued to be used through the ’80s, and then eventually the industry figured out that if we were going to really be able to go into deeper water—obviously divers had limitations, and we can’t put them down there for a lot of physical and risk reasons—ROVs were the way to go. But we also had to sign up to building hardware that is, you know, consistent with what the ROV’s capabilities really are, which probably took off more in the late ’80s and then the early ’90s, when we started getting into much deeper depths. And it was obvious that this was the only route we could go. So it has always been this chicken-and-egg problem. The ROV gets a little better, then the technology improves manipulators, and it goes back and forth, and ends up where we are today.

Divers are still very functional—one, because there is still a lot of old hardware out there that is really only able to be operated by people. But they are not using them in as deep water, as much as they used to. They are actually moving toward working divers in depths that are less and less. But a lot of divers are still out there, working throughout the world. It’s a big part of the industry. ROVs, on the other hand, have grown significantly. The size and capabilities of some of the work class vehicles out there are just amazing.

WO: What do you think the next big breakthrough or development in the ROV industry is going to be? What direction?

Tom Ayars: Other than more automation generally, I think the other thing that the industry is looking at is the autonomous vehicle. We have a bunch of autonomous vehicles, now, that really are more for seabed mapping. So, they literally can take this unit, throw it over the side, and it goes from Point A through Point B and does some mapping. I think people are hoping that if they could ever pull this off, what they are talking about is having a resident vehicle.

So, as your infrastructure gets fully developed and mature, you’ll have fiber optics, of course, going down to every wellhead. You’ll also have power going down to control systems. And if you go back to the scenario I talked about earlier, you’ll have the multi-million-dollar vessel, the multi-million-dollar ROVs, and the size of all that to be able to manage the operation. The theory is that you actually can just take an ROV, an autonomous vehicle, and throw it over the side. It’s programmed to go down to its home in a specific field, plug itself in, and the need for the vessel is no longer there. You may have a pilot on the platform, because of the fiber optics, and then it can do local work. It could power up, you could program, and you could operate and do local tasks.

Then you want to go over to Platform B, which is five miles away, literally program it in, unplug it—back to the wireless GPS concept—it flies over, it goes to the next field, plugs itself in, and now you don’t have the high day rates, right? There are going to be some limitations, I think, to the tasks that those ROVs can do. But, when you really look at space travel and air travel, and ROVs in general, that technology starts to get some traction, and it moves quickly. And there is investment out there, ready to try to make some of this happen.