C-CORE, an international leader in research and development based at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, has launched The Centre for Arctic Resource Development (CARD), an initiative to help unlock the potential of the Arctic’s rich – and largely untapped – natural resources. CARD is supported by $16.5 million in combined funding from the Hibernia and Terra Nova projects and the Research & Development Corporation of Newfoundland and Labrador (RDC).

The Hibernia and Terra Nova projects will each contribute $6.25 million over five years ($1.25 million each per year) to support leading-edge research projects and programs, as well as technology development. RDC will provide $4 million to build a 1,260 square metre expansion to C-CORE’s Dr. Jack Clark Geotechnical Engineering Building on Memorial’s St. John’s campus.

“World-class, industry-driven R&D and proven operational capability is helping to position Newfoundland & Labrador as a centre of technological excellence for oil and gas projects in ice-prone regions,” said Honourable Shawn Skinner, Minister of Natural Resources, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador. “Building on the existing base of expertise, the CARD will help position this province, its industry and its institutes as the centre of technological excellence for Arctic oil and gas development.”

CARD intends to build a critical mass of Arctic expertise in St. John’s based on (1) the lessons learned from offshore Newfoundland and Labrador, (2) C-CORE’s 36-years of experience in remote sensing, ice engineering and geotechnical engineering, and (3) attracting Arctic experts from across Canada as well as “rising research stars” from Memorial’s and other universities’ graduate programs. Thirty full-time staff will be hired, “but the Centre has the potential to grow to 40 or more staff, as it attracts new projects and new funding,” said Dr. Charles Randell, C-CORE’s President and CEO. “Potentially, sponsoring oil and gas and/or services companies could second staff to CARD to participate in the research activities or manage projects.  The Centre will invite experts from around the globe to serve as ‘experts-in-residence’, providing valuable input into the projects and mentoring junior staff.”

The Centre will bring together industry, academic and technology partners to conduct medium- to long- term research and development focused on improving Canada’s capacity and capability to support safe, responsible, cost-effective and sustainable hydrocarbon development in Arctic and other ice- and iceberg-prone regions.

CARD has engaged the oil and gas companies that are active offshore Newfoundland and Labrador that also have an interest in Arctic development—including CARD sponsors ExxonMobil (the Operator of Hibernia) and Suncor Energy (the Operator of Terra Nova)—in a consultation process to begin making a decision chart for priorities which will lead to the development of an Arctic roadmap. This includes characterizing the environmental and logistical conditions in the Canadian Arctic, identifying a range of development options, defining technology gaps, and identifying likelihoods of success. Guided by a five-year R&D plan that has been approved by an advisory body of experts for potential to improve exploration and production in harsh, cold environments, CARD will then develop a research program and undertake research.  

Paul Leonard, President of Hibernia Management and Development Company Ltd. (HMDC), said, "Research and development associated with operating in harsh arctic climates have enabled the development of Hibernia and the Hibernia Southern Extension subsea project. The research that will be undertaken through CARD will be focused on improving industry's capacity for oil and gas production and transportation from ice- and iceberg-prone regions."

Sandy Martin, Vice President, East Coast with Suncor Energy, operator of Terra Nova, said, “The Terra Nova development and the rest of our industry already take advantage of the exceptional harsh climate expertise available at C-CORE, and CARD is a natural extension and enhancement of that. The innovative research to be conducted at CARD will put Newfoundland & Labrador on the map as a leader in arctic research and expertise.”

A Joint Industry Project (JIP) launched by INTECSEA aims to advance the application of existing and emerging subsea technologies in strategically important offshore oil and gas developments in remote and hostile environments—particularly in offshore arctic and cold-climate regions. The JIP is led out of INTECSEA’s St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada office. Petroleum Research Atlantic Canada (PRAC) administers the contractual entity. 

INTECSEA kicked off the JIP in December 2010 in St. John’s. Completion is scheduled for year-end 2011. JIP participants include three oil companies participating in arctic developments offshore Eastern Canada.

“The prize is enhanced confidence in deeper waters and ice-prone regions worldwide while improving the availability of valuable hydrocarbons,” said Uri Nooteboom, president of INTECSEA, a leading engineering and project delivery company serving the offshore oil and gas industry. With 17 offices across five continents, INTECSEA, a WorleyParsons Group company, delivers solutions for floating systems, marine pipelines and risers, subsea and control systems and offshore technologies including flow assurance and materials engineering. Noteboom added that frontier developments in cold climates—where ice floes and icebergs are prominent much of the year—and remote offshore arctic areas require robust subsea systems that effectively manage the extraction of produced fluids and transportation to the end user.

Frontier and deep water prospects offshore Eastern Canada which would benefit from the JIP research include Orphan Basin, Laurenian Basin, Central Ridge/Flemish Pass and the Labrador Shelf, said Mike Paulin, INTECSEA Operations Director for Canada. “The Labrador Shelf is a very harsh environment and will require innovative solutions to overcome the challenges,” he said.

The Labrador Shelf includes water depths up to 9,900 feet and experiences waves up to 43 feet high. Ice conditions on the Labrador Shelf are significant, with pack ice reaching a thickness up to 23 feet and icebergs a serious threat from July through October.

To address these and other frontier issues, the JIP will generate a database with a user-interface tool that allows operators and developers to screen and select from a broad array of active production technologies, including separation, boosting, compression and direct electric heating systems, suitable for stranded and existing field developments. Inherent evaluations include system installability, operability, reliability and maintainability issues specific to the environment, as well as technology maturity and any additional fit-for-purpose qualification programs.

Efforts of the JIP will redefine current industry limits for field development architecture in cold-climate regions while improving expectations for robust systems that are flexible and responsive. The application of active subsea production technologies may deliver new strides in field development in the following areas:

            - Extend present arctic oil tie-back limits of below 10 kilometers or six miles to a goal of around 50 kilometers or 30 miles, and

            - Tie-back subsea wells in potentially 10,000 feet of arctic water to a floating production facility in shallower, more protected waters.

The JIP is also tackling prominent offshore arctic issues, including the impact of iceberg scouring on subsea facilities, said Paulin. “A floater can be relocated but subsea facilities cannot,” he added. Arctic operators, particularly offshore Eastern Canada, dig huge holes—60 feet deep and up to 1,080 feet long—or the length of three football fields—to avoid ice scouring, explained Paulin. “This approach is costly, time-intensive and will not sustain the level of subsea development the industry anticipates,” Paulin said.

The Government of Newfoundland and Labrador has announced a $500,000 investment in NavSim Technology Inc., a St. John’s-based software and hardware developer of electronic navigation solutions. The investment will support the company’s efforts to target growth opportunities in international markets for its navigational software which reduces the risk of collision or grounding for recreational boaters and major ship traffic. According to the company, NavSim currently has a greater than 90 per cent share of the Canadian piloting market for the safe and efficient navigational handling of marine traffic near land using buoys and other landmarks. NavSim will use the investment to expand sales activities, do market and product testing and initiate marketing campaigns in Europe, Asia and the United States.

“NavSim is fortunate to have access to a world-class post-secondary education system and R&D infrastructure and an almost bottomless pool of smart, talented young engineers and developers,” said NavSim CEO Alvin Osmond. “However, difficulties accessing private investment and financing, especially for software ventures, put us at a major disadvantage when competing with technology firms in the United States and Europe. With this contribution, NavSim Technology will be much better equipped to secure an international market-leadership position in marine e-navigation systems.”

“NavSim Technology’s ability to capture a large portion of the Canadian piloting market has proven that it can deliver a solution that enables safer and more effective management of port and waterway traffic,” said Susan Sullivan, Minister of Innovation, Trade and Rural Development, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador. “With this investment, the company is now better positioned to build its operational capacity to expand its market coverage into new international markets. The development of knowledge-based industries starts at our post-secondary and research institutions. Supporting the commercialization of the tremendous activity at our local institutions and the establishment of new industries is central in the province’s economic development. It is an approach that will benefit the province for the long term.”

NavSim Technology began as a research initiative at the National Research Council Institute for Ocean Technology in St. John’s and in 2002 was turned into a business. In 2009, the company received the Canadian Innovation Leader Award for its industry-leading achievements in pioneering advanced navigation systems.

On April 25, Marport Deep Sea Technologies Inc. of St. John’s announced AquaPix®, a new interferometric Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) developed for mine countermeasures, hydrography, seabed survey and other underwater imaging markets. AquaPix® is based on Marport’s Software Defined Sonar®, an underwater acoustics technology platform that enables advanced underwater sensing, communications and imaging products. The software-centric architecture enables digital signal processing to be executed in multiple FPGA cores allowing dynamic reconfiguration and massively parallel processing performance.

The sonar is frequency agile from 200 – 400 kHz and offers range-independent resolution of 2.5cm by 2.5cm with co-registered 3D bathymetry. Effective swath widths are up to 12 times water depth in shallow water, to a maximum width of 600m. According to Marport, this swath width more than doubles that achieved by currently available high-resolution bathymetric sonars. The new sonar is suited to applications where seabed image quality is critical.

SAS is a type of sonar in which sophisticated signal processing of successive acoustic pings is utilized to form an image with significantly higher resolution than conventional sonars. The image formation can require aligning the echoes to less than 0.1 millimetres. This is made possible through recent advances in broadband sonar technology combined with adaptive focusing techniques similar to those used in optics, but performed in software rather than in hardware.

When integrated onboard an AUV, the AquaPix® uses sonar sensor data with multi-aspect diversity to reconstruct images . "Underwater imaging markets present very demanding requirements not only for sonar performance but also overall image quality," said Karl Kenny, President & CEO of Marport. "With AquaPix®, we are again leveraging our latest Software Defined Sonar® technologies to bring critical improvements in quality and performance. AquaPix® provides the underwater imaging markets with a price competitive solution to replace and overcome the performance shortfalls of conventional systems."

Its sonar design exploits a dual row frequency multiplexed transducer array which allows selection of the vertical beamwidth of both the transmitter and the receiver on the fly in order to optimally suppress multipath. Two beams with different beam-widths are transmitted at the same time, at different frequencies, and the best beam is dynamically selected by frequency filtering, a technique based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) used in radio communications for the same purpose. The multiplex also provides the high level of spatial overlap required to robustly implement adaptive focusing techniques.

PanGeo Subsea Inc. of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, a service provider of high-definition 3D sub-seabed acoustic imaging, and SeaRoc Inc. of Brighton, UK, a consultancy with experience in offshore wind, wave and tidal energy, have entered into a working agreement to pool their expertise to offer a comprehensive service package to the offshore renewable industry.

The two companies will provide a bundled site investigation service that includes project management, vessels, imaging equipment and data collection and analysis to support the near-shore and offshore requirements of investigations and installations related to the development of wind farms.

“PanGeo Subsea has broad-based intellectual property and expertise related to high-definition, detailed volumetric mapping of the sub-seabed,” said PanGeo Subsea President Moya Cahill. “Our technology involves a family of stationary acoustic coring tools called the Acoustic CorerTM and an ROV/AUV platform-supported near-surface sub-seabed unit, the Sub-Bottom ImagerTM, delivering continuous volumetric mapping. Combined with the significant offshore and project management experience that SeaRoc puts forward, we will deliver a dramatic improvement in the resolution and focusing ability for 3D site investigations and route surveys for our customers.”

“As a marine consultancy, SeaRoc has been involved in the offshore renewable industry since 2002 and the majority of offshore wind farm projects (in the UK)”, said SeaRoc Chief Operating Officer Eric Briar. “Our marine knowledge and experience, twinned with the Acoustic Corer and Sub-Bottom Imager, will deliver results not yet seen in the industry and for us that is a very compelling offering.”

PanGeo Subsea specializes in 3D and 4D subsea acoustic imaging, utilizing acoustic tools that deliver high-resolution volumetric delineation of sub-seabed hazards and sediment variations. The company’s international clients include: oil and gas (installations, decommissioning, pipeline installation and monitoring), renewable energy (foundations), military (Q routes and UXO detection); marine civil engineering; archaeology and mining. Corporate headquarters and technology development are located in St. John’s, Newfoundland, with global operations and business development in Aberdeen, UK.

SeaRoc provides specialist products and services to the offshore renewable energy sector, offering marine engineering, quality, health, safety and environment (QHSE) and geographic information system (GIS) data management expertise with applications that support the lifecycle of offshore wind, wave and tidal projects. SeaRoc has been involved from site selection through construction to operations and maintenance on a large number of UK offshore wind projects, as well as an increasing number of Northern European and North American projects. 

Rutter Technologies, a division of Rutter, Inc. of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada has secured a $1.3 million (US) order to provide its Oil Spill Detection and Management Systems to Marine Spill Response Corporation (MSRC). Delivery will begin immediately and is expected to be completed in April 2011.

“This purchase by Marine Spill Response Corporation is intended to enhance offshore skimming capabilities during night-time operations as well as during times of decreased visibility,” said Rutter President and CEO Fraser Edison. “The majority of the units will be deployed on boats and barges operating in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Based in Herndon, Virginia, Marine Spill Response Corporation is an oil-spill response organization that owns and operates a fleet of dedicated oil spill response vessels, self-propelled skimming vessels, boom, and skimming systems in the continental US, Hawaii and the Caribbean.

In June 2010 Rutter Inc. and Aptomar AS of Trondheim, Norway launched the Integrated Oil Spill Response and Management System which integrates Rutter’s Sigma S6 radar processor and display with Aptomar’s infrared camera, real-time video, searchlight capabilities, and chart-based display.  The integrated system provides automatic oil spill detection and tracking, area, thickness and volume estimations as well as oil spill drift prediction, detection of boom leakage and disposition of the oil spill skimmer.

Rutter’s Sigma S6 radar processor will enhance oil spill response vessels’ capability to operate around the clock independent of visibility, which was an issue during the cleanup of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, said Byron Dawe, President, Rutter Technologies Products Group.

For further coverage of Rutter’s Sigma S6 radar system and Oil Spill Response and Management System, see “Specialized Radar for Ice and Oil Spill Detection”, pages 14-17 in the January/February issue of Marine Technology Reporter.  

Sales revenues in the 50 companies within Oceans Advance, Newfoundland and Labrador’s ocean technology cluster, have increased by 126 per cent since 2006--31 per cent annually--from $225 million to $509 million. Related sales revenues increased from $129 million to $433 million during that time. Exports increased by 300 per cent.

Dennis Hogan, Assistant Deputy Minister of the Province’s Department of Innovation, Trade and Rural Development, reported on the growth of the cluster at the National Research Council’s Institute of Ocean Technology on January 13th.

Hogan, who recently completed an MBA in Innovation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), compared the innovation ecosystem at MIT and Harvard to the activity within Oceans Advance: “I felt pride in our companies and what we’re doing here. Our research and technology firms are on par in a lot of ways.” The main differences he cited are location, geography, scale, and scope. He attributed the hotbed of innovation in the cluster to “the resilience in the population which comes from living on a barren rock.”

Private-sector R&D expenditures increased 57 per cent to $23 million, and institutional spending on research surpassed $20 million. In the question and answer period following the announcement, Dr. Henri Rothschild, President & CEO, International Science and Technology Partnerships Canada, said that R&D intensity in Newfoundland and Labrador’s ocean technology cluster is among the highest in Canada when measured either on a per capita basis or by economic output.    

Information systems, sensors, and communications is the strongest category of technical competencies among companies in the cluster (50 per cent), followed by vessel and platform engineering (40 per cent), and autonomous systems, intelligent systems, and robotics (36 per cent).

The provincial government's Department of Innovation, Trade, and Rural Development is investing in the ocean technology sector through a number of programs and initiatives including the Ocean Technology Investment Fund, OceanTech Global, incubation support, Polaris Program, and the Northwest Atlantic Ocean Observing System Partnership. 

Asked what is driving the growth among the companies in the cluster, Oceans Advance’s Executive Director Les O’Reilly said, “Our companies have grown to understand that the avenues to successful business development and innovation include having the right talent, encouraging collaboration, risk taking, being global in outlook, and organizing the innovation process from beginning to end."