Development and sea trial of real-time offshore pipeline installation monitoring system

Deep-water or open sea area developments bring technology challenges to offshore pipeline installation safeties. With low oil price, offshore contractors endure considerable pressure and struggle to provide cost-effective services. To achieve safe operations with higher efficiencies, it is essential to acquire better understanding of pipeline conditions in-process, which benefits operation planning and decision making. Offshore operational window and pipeline fatigue damage significantly depends on vessel motions. Current engineering practices generally predict motions through metocean and hydrodynamics based numerical simulations. This approach is useful but naturally leads itself to prediction uncertainties, which are most likely conservatism. With deep-water and open sea application, the uncertainties may become underestimations of key parameters due to possibly insufficient metocean data and inapplicable hydrodynamic methods. Subsequently, a real-time offshore pipeline installation monitoring system has been developed to predict realistic pipeline behavior by adoption of real-time operation parameters including vessel motions. A sea-trial for the system has been conducted on a pipelay project in 2016. As an alternative treatment to pipeline installation planning and decision making, the system has been proven capable of accurate simulations and additional functions such as touch point monitoring and fatigue tracking.