Subsea drones seek global footprint

A business led by Northern Star Resources chairman Chris Rowe has capitalised on cost cutting by oil and gas companies to position itself among the world’s elite commercial operators of underwater drones.

Subiaco-based Blue Ocean Monitoring, which six months ago had one $US250,000 drone (also known as underwater autonomous vehicles, or gliders), is preparing for delivery of its fifth.

The equipment and its technology, used by the US Navy, can monitor and detect leaking underwater oil and gas infrastructure, and replaces the need for costly boat and dive teams.

Managing director Simon Illingworth said companies globally were gaining greater environmental awareness and reacting to a drop in the price of oil, prompting them to try new ways to look after underwater assets.

“It’s very low cost for the oil and gas industry, we’re talking a few thousand dollars a day,” Mr Illingworth said.

Blue Ocean, which was started by Mr Rowe in May 2014, is currently the only company using the technology in Australia after developing its own systems and software to detect oil and gas leaks as deep as one kilometre below the ocean's surface.

It has deployed gliders for the North West Shelf and a mining company in Indonesia, is in discussions with Australian, South-East Asian, Middle East and South African operators, and is planning a second office.

“We’ve been dragged up to open an office in Singapore. We’ve had a lot of demand to service the South-East Asia oil and gas industry,” Mr Illingworth said.

The gliders, which are battery powered and buoyancy propelled, stay in the water often up to nine months at a time, being remotely controlled by Blue Ocean’s operators who can receive and give clients real time data 24 hours a day.

Mr Illingworth said the business was well funded through private investment and had access to further cash, but would consider other funding opportunities, including selling to a global surveyor or oil and gas servicing company.

“As soon as you’ve got more than 10 or 15 gliders you’ve become a global operator, you need a global footprint,” he said.