Sonardyne International Ltd has received an order valued at over £2.1 million from international oil and gas turnkey contractor, Saipem. The order includes six SPRINT systems and associated acoustic positioning equipment making it Sonardyne’s largest sale of acoustically aided inertial navigation technology to date.
SPRINT (Subsea Precision Reference Inertial Navigation Technology) will be deployed in April in the West Delta Deep Marine concession (WDDM). This natural gas field is situated about 90 kilometres offshore the North-West Nile Delta, at water depths between 400 and 1,000 metres. Saipem is responsible for the engineering, procurement, construction and installation of a total of eight new subsea wellheads and relevant infrastructures, umbilicals and flowlines.
Since its launch in 2010 SPRINT has been operationally proven to extend the operating limits and increase the efficiency of subsea operations when using Ultra Short BaseLine (USBL) and Long BaseLine (LBL) positioning systems. In the Sparse LBL mode that Saipem plans to operate SPRINT in at WDDM, surveyors will be able to obtain accurate high integrity positioning data with less equipment to deploy than full LBL. This will significantly reduce operation time and vessel costs.
SPRINT tightly couples Sonardyne’s Lodestar INS platform with Fusion 6G, the industry standard LBL system. With known transponder positions, the Lodestar mounted on an ROV can use the ranges from one or more seabed deployed transponders to acoustically aid the INS and constrain error growth in the absolute position output.
Commenting on the order, Sonardyne’s Vice President Europe and Africa, Barry Cairns said, “We are delighted that Saipem has shown its commitment to SPRINT. The company has been a major user of Sonardyne products for many years and this latest order is recognition of the major cost and time savings SPRINT and sparse LBL will bring to its field development projects.”
[mappress] Subsea World News Staff , April 16, 2012; Image: Sonardyne