Feasibility of Seakeeping, Cost and GHG Efficiency of <24m SWATH design for ROV deployment

Offshore critical national infrastructure, such as subsea cables and wind farms, requires increasing asset integrity inspections to ensure safe operations, and decrease downtime through preventative maintenance. Annual Offshore Windfarm subsea inspections costs are estimated at £18m/yr per 1GW (£900m @50GW anticipated by 2030 in UK; Crown Estate). Given that by 2028 20% of the 69GW operational fleet will be more than 10-years old, inspection and services of OSW is expected to grow rapidly.

Subsea inspections require launch and recovery of Remote Operated Vehicles (ROV) from an offshore platform which is subject to variable seastate conditions. Current vessel designs are inefficient E.g. to increase operational inspection time, companies deploy larger vessels which offer a more stable platform in large sea states, but consume 10-50m3/day of diesel (39.6-132tCO2/day).

Operators are investigating smaller uncrewed solutions. However these smaller platforms are restricted to operating in seastates