Unreliable Energy Focus: Subsea Operations & the Dream of Flatness

This article is the first (of hopefully many) that will focus on the international energy sector. Without a consistent publication schedule, they will be titled, for the time being "Unreliable Energy Focus."

                                          (source: Bloomberg Businessweek)

Floating oil platforms, subject to weather and waves, are expensive and soon could be a thing of the past, if the energy industry is taken for its word in a recent article in Bloomberg Businessweek. In fact, the industry wants to put nearly all the technology currently on the ocean's surface on the sea floor, sans humans. Subsea operations would be entirely mechanical and largely automated.

While the image above may look like fantasy, putting machinery down on the abyssal plain, able to withstand the extreme pressure and temperatures, is already happening, though not on the scale desired by the energy industry. The energy (largely oil, some gas) is currently pumped up, albeit inefficiently, often miles to the surface where it is processed.

There are, nonetheless, a number of technical and environmental factors to be considered that are being overlooked by the business case. To start, the abyssal plain is flat and largely featureless, but it is not "tabletop flat" and it is not entirely lifeless. To put it gently, humanity knows very little about the abyssal plain, and even less so about the natural processes that occur there. Putting major machinery there could disrupt fragile chains that we know nothing about (not that we haven't done that before).

Additionally, without humans, what is the plan for maintenance, repair, and damage control? It seems that the whole system would be built on sensors and robots that could fail and produce far-reaching issues. Deepwater Horizon happened not so long ago and the long-term effects of that spill are still unknown. In a sense, is the system setup to handle a black swan event?

It was in 1961 that the first pressure control valves were places on the seafloor by Royal Dutch Shell. Even though technology moves ever faster, putting everything on the seafloor and moving to entirely subsea operations so quickly is unlikely - it has been a long and gradual process since 1961. Moreover, an evaluation of the potential environmental impact needs to be conducted. The short-term benefits should not trump long-term concerns. After addressing these issues, it may be time to move forward, but it would be a failure if we kid ourselves about this being easy.