As demand grows for insights into subsea oil and gas infrastructure, enhanced data collection is becoming essential to ensure the safety and integrity of extended operations.

However, there is one critical challenge remaining around conducting monitoring in these remote offshore environments:

How do you reliably power these monitoring systems, when more data equals greater energy consumption?

This challenge becomes all the more acute when sensor packages and their ability to provide meaningful data is ever increasing.

As I’ll discuss below, Verlume’s Charge system is directly addressing this challenge.

Revolutionising subsea monitoring

Charge is a seabed-based, rechargeable pressure encapsulated battery unit that is configured to deliver reliable and efficient power to remote offshore environments.

To date, the system has been deployed across North America – including in the Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America), where we recently supported an advanced leak detection scope, and off the East coast of Canada.

Charge is revolutionising subsea monitoring by being able to provide a rechargeable battery system with an enhanced level of energy storage (10’s of kWhs), far beyond what is practical to achieve with non-rechargeable battery systems and an order of magnitude more cost effective than laying a cable.

Charge’s capabilities mean that your supply of subsea data no longer needs to be curtailed by a lack of power.

A range of use cases

Across the oil and gas sector, there are a number of key use cases for Charge’s reliable power delivery including:

  • Pipeline & Riser Integrity Monitoring

Sensors along pipeline corridors detect strain, corrosion or hydrate formation risks.

  • Wellhead & Manifold Surveillance

Monitoring vibration, temperature or flow anomalies around production infrastructure.

  • Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) Site Monitoring

Leak detection and reservoir integrity require constant pressure and acoustic data from the seabed.

  • Seabed Movement & Geotechnical Monitoring

Tracking subsidence, slope stability and geohazards in complex fields, as well as seismic nodes for earthquake or tsunami early warning systems.

  • Decommissioning Oversight

Ensuring the ongoing safety and environmental compliance of legacy wells and infrastructure.

  • Marine Environmental Monitoring

Measuring noise levels, biodiversity, water quality and habitat changes around offshore operations.

Charge provides a dependable and scalable power solution that supports smarter, data-driven decisions, to not only increase efficiency in existing operations but to also unlock the potential for wider subsea digitalisation.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss more, please send me an e-mail on chris.wallace@verlume.world