The level of interest on the part of the oil companies makes it quite clear that we are talking about a future product with a global market,” said Lars Mathisen.Īs well as acting as an environmental watch-dog, the system will help oil and gas companies predict the lifetime of pipes and enable them to plan ahead. “Our aim is to develop a system that the participants in the project will be able to commercialise.

Once developed, they are hoping for the technology to spread. There are major challenges involved in bring power to the sensors and making the sensors and electronics sufficiently robust to withstand the pipe-laying process and the challenging seabed environment, not to mention bringing the data back to the control centres,” said Lars Mathisen, vice president of underwater communication company SICOM, one of the research partners. The new system will instead continuously scan the length of a pipeline for structural weaknesses and rust, as well as closely monitoring the flow inside to ensure optimum transmission.įour oil and gas companies have joined forces with the Research Council of Norway to finance the £3.6 million (41m Norwegian Kroner) project, which will create a “smart pipe” capable of collecting sophisticated data underwater, sending and processing it for day-to-day monitoring, but also storing it to be used in mathematical models.Įxperts from the SINTEF research institute and four Norwegian companies specialising in pipeline technology and corrosion monitoring will work together to develop the ‘smart pipe’ over the next three years. Information about the state of the transport arteries lying on the seabed has so far been limited to punctual data from sensors and ROVs.

Smart pipenet