Offshore oil gas trends in ROVs tooling

The ROVs that operate in today's offshore environment bear little or no resemblance to those which first began supporting the oil and gas work requirements less than 15 years ago. In that short span of time, an explosion of subsea technology has occurred, rendering older equipment obsolete and expanding subsea remote intervention capabilities beyond the horizon of intervention tasks originally envisioned. Today's offshore work ROVs employ the latest in robotics, fiver optics, acoustics, video, and computer technologies, and routinely achieve better than 90 percent operational availability. Leading offshore ROV operations companies have demonstrated less than 1 percent down-time over thousands of hours of operation. As the offshore oil and gas market evolves, the ever-expanding capabilities of the work ROV plays a major role in shaping the operational concepts employed in subsea oil and gas field exploration, development, and production. This paper explores the capabilities of available ROV systems in use offshore today, the economic trends driving ROV technology development, and the new trends in the employment of ROVs and their associated sensors and tooling systems.