operations as well. We are trying to minimize the risk exposure of our personnel, while promoting the sustainability of our planet. Fugro’s remote operations centers are a good example of this. Here, we can manage our operations from a center without having any crew in the field. We have worked as well with virtual software and hardware that allows clients to visit and supervise installations without actually being physically there. Furthermore, Fugro has technology to remotely operate underwater vehicles and other unmanned vehicles.
Q: What is the balance in Fugro’s Mexican portfolio between exploration, field development and EOR/IOR?
A: We have very balanced operations for both of our business lines, site characterization and asset integrity. In Mexico, the entirety of our operation is dedicated to the oil and gas sector where we support exploration, field development and construction. What we are seeing at a global level is that the oil and gas sector accounts for half of our revenue and we are seeing a rapid worldwide increase in the area of renewable energies like wind, solar and others.
Q: How can Fugro provide added value during the transition of oil and gas companies toward sustainable goals?
A: There has been a gradual transition in many parts of the world where some traditional oil companies are changing their portfolios towards renewable resources and Fugro has quite a lot of experience worldwide participating in this market, especially in Europe and the United States. Mexico has started its transition and advancing in sustainable energy goals, we know it is a long road but we expect to see the development of more projects in this industry like offshore wind farms where Fugro is in a great position to bring this experience to the country.
Q: What are Fugro’s development plans for Mexico’s oil and gas market in 2021?
A: The pandemic has paused our business development to some degree; however, our plans continue to move forward with our vision to be the specialist in Geo-data solutions and become the preferred provider for our clients in this regard. Fugro can provide appropriate solutions at every stage of the project. We have the resources and technology to participate from the initial design through the construction phase and thereafter, when assets need to be monitored. Our plan is to take Fugro to this level so clients will be able to fully rely on our data through the project’s lifecycle to make it a success.
it established a subsidiary called Sea-Kit that was dedicated to solving the issue. By using AUVs, it arguably had one part of the puzzle. But it still had to figure out how to construct an unmanned and remotely operated vessel (in this case an unmanned surface vehicle or USV) that could interact with an AUV to deploy it and retrieve it from the ocean floor. The result is a ship called USV Maxlimer. The final competition involved each team mapping at least 250km2 of the Mediterranean Sea floor near the Greek city of Kalamata at 5m horizontal resolution or higher in less than 24 hours. However, this was only the beginning of the Maxlimer’s journey. “USV Maxlimer has since proven its ability to match the quality and yield of data produced by crewed survey vessels, during a 22-day un-crewed trans-Atlantic survey (UTAS) co-funded by the UK Space Agency through the European Space Agency’s Business Application program. Sea-Kit worked collaboratively with industry partners on the UTAS project, including Fugro, Global Marine Group, Map the Gaps, Teledyne CARIS, Woods Hole Group and The Nippon Foundation-Gebco Seabed 2030 project,” Trewern wrote. As a global geo-data specialist, Fugro is deeply involved in all aspects in which hydrographic surveying is applied to offshore projects for both the hydrocarbon and energy sectors. This led Sea-Kit to deliver the first 12m X Class Sea-Kit USV to Fugro at the end of 2020. According to Trewern, the vehicle’s first missions will consider the following: “The vessel will conduct completely uncrewed ROV pipeline inspections in water depths of up to 450m on Australia’s North West Shelf. A second vessel will have a similar specification and is scheduled for delivery to Aberdeen in the first quarter of 2021.”
Ivar de Josselin de Jong, global solutions director for Remote Inspections at Fugro, quoted in Trewern’s article, explained that, “these solutions are undoubtedly the future of the industry for three key reasons. The first, and most important, is safety. Autonomous and remote solutions generate a significant reduction in total HSSE exposure. Whereas before, crews would be exposed to harsh and sometimes unpredictable marine environments, now we have the capabilities for the most difficult tasks to be conducted remotely, hugely decreasing the risk to personnel. Second, there are significant environmental benefits. With small and hybrid vessels, we can reduce fuel consumption by over 95 percent, which in turn means a large reduction in the overall carbon footprint of our operations. Finally, there is the data collection itself. The new capabilities allow for faster and better-quality insights. Better quality insights mean more effective decision-making because data acquired remotely are available in near real-time.”
ROC Asset Management’s
Place In A New World
The oil and gas industry may have a reputation for slow adoption of new technologies and new performance techniques but Remote Operation Centers (ROCs) are an exception, with companies implementing these new practices long before 2020. Many branches and categories of oil and gas development, automation, remote monitoring and remote management have been among the technological strides toward efficiency, both through direct savings these technologies generate and through possible additional cost reductions. The implementation of such technologies has created safer workplaces where all chains of decision-making are more easily traced and optimized.
In many systems and configurations made up of these technologies, ROCs are considered the central nervous system through which these operational benefits are made clear to the end user. Before 2020, ROCs were already trending toward higher degrees of technological sophistication and maneuverability, especially as AI and IoT applications opened new possibilities for remote operations. However, some companies understandably continued to resist the significant expense that ROCs could represent.
2020 changed all of that. After weeks and months of lockdowns to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, ROCs became the most essential tool to help managers maintain operational continuity. Meanwhile, premium service and technology providers with ROCs of their own enjoyed an enormous advantage over their
competitors. A perfect example is Fugro’s world-class ROC in Aberdeen. Using this ROC, Fugro’s clients could track the status of any service they recently contracted, such as the ongoing progress of inspections and surveys or the realtime status of ROVs on the ocean floor. Thanks to this ROC investment, remote solutions could be offered through a minimal amount of bandwidth and additional equipment. More remote monitoring and management options translate into fewer onsite inspectors and managers, which became crucial during the pandemic. How small a crew is needed to work in offshore environments is the No. 1 factor that determines how safe an operation is.
The remote operation enabled by Fugro’s ROC also has a sizable impact on the company’s carbon footprint, which is now considerably smaller. An increase in remote communication and decision-making also means fewer vessels and less travel for experts to specific on-site locations around the world. Adopting these new practices has resulted in faster data transfers and deliveries, along with balance sheets that provide evidence of cost-effective operations and asset management. Alastair McKie, Fugro’s Director of Remote Operations for Europe and Africa, says that, “remote operations and the ROC in Aberdeen bring significant industry benefits in terms of operational efficiency, enhanced safety and the environment.”
Fugro’s ROC also supports the expansion of the company’s decommissioning services. Recently, the company signed a contract with Well-Safe Solutions to provide remote rig control onboard the Well-Safe Guardian rig, plus additional ROC support. In general, Fugro’s Aberdeen ROC provides a stalwart model of how global companies can best conduct themselves in light of the unexpected circumstances that have affected the oil and gas industry. In the near future, this model will become very useful among all service providers in the sector.
number of geological mapping projects that have generated a sturdy base of knowledge regarding that coastal region. However, Mexico’s Pacific and Caribbean coasts would be considered frontier regions by comparison.
Cooper and Starchenko say site characterization can “detail surface and subsurface conditions to help identify and mitigate potential geohazards in the lease area, and inform the design, construction and installation of wind turbine foundations, cabling and related infrastructure.” This makes site characterization not only essential to the establishment of wind turbines in Mexico’s frontier regions but also necessary for the laying of transmission cables and infrastructure that would not be present on site and needs to be developed from scratch given the regions’ primordial state.
Independent Surveying Technologies
The geological data acquisition campaigns need to successfully characterize project sites, collecting datasets that include bathymetry, side-scan sonar, high-resolution seismic and magnetometry. The resulting water depth and seafloor elevation data is used to report project design parameters that include turbine height and the design of turbine bases to account for seabed conditions, including as sand waves, geohazards, such as boulders, and anthropogenic hazards, such as shipwrecks and abandoned or otherwise decommission oil and gas infrastructure, which is very common in the GOM. Environmental concerns must be taken into account; for instance, avoiding any possible damage to coral reefs.
Fugro has developed surveying technologies that have proven to be flexible and independent to meet the needs of these campaigns. The first is the Fugro RAMMS (Rapid Airborne Multibeam Mapping System), a nextgeneration airborne LiDAR mapping system that delivers industry-leading depth penetration and point densities for fast and accurate bathymetry in nearshore and coastal waters from a lightweight and compact frame that can be operated from certain drones and other similar uncrewed aerial vehicles.
The second is the FAS-900 (Fugro Autonomous Surveyor 900), an uncrewed surface vessel that can collect multibeam echosounder data in full autonomy, semi-autonomy or by remote control in offshore and coastal waters. “In addition to improving data collection rates, these systems help improve project safety and sustainability by limiting the number of crew needed in the field and significantly reducing fuel demands,” explain Cooper and Starchenko. The unmanned nature of these technologies opens them up to be further developed into increasingly independent and automated tools that can cover a great deal of ground in terms of seabed analysis with increasingly smaller budgets.
Commitment To Post Survey Analysis
Another success factor to site characterization is the analysis that follows surveying and data acquisition. For example, Fugro has experience in the conduction of geotechnical site studies (once a general site or possible candidate has been selected) to “ground-truth” for the ground model in the project’s time frame. If successful, these studies can be used to inform the positions and engineering designs of wind turbines and their foundations with more detail, including the choice between jackets and monopiles for such foundations, for example, along with the positioning and engineering design of inter-array cables and the optimal methods for their installation, such as the choice between jet-plowing and trenching. This can increase the efficiency with which offshore wind projects are developed in the future, which will prove essential in economically benefiting Mexico.
As Cooper and Starchenko conclude, “high-quality data allow conservatism to be removed from the engineering design, which translates to significant material and cost savings.”
Award Shines Light on Geo-Data for Offshore Wind Development
Global Geo-data specialist Fugro has been commended for their contribution to offshore wind technology, specifically in the development of a centralized, cloud-hosted Geo-data management and engagement platform called Gaia.Hub.
Last quarter, the Business Network for Offshore Wind presented Fugro with a Ventus award for “Advancement in Project Siting and Development” based on the company’s work to implement Gaia.Hub to support the US-based Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind development project.
Online since April 2021, the solution has allowed Atlantic Shores’ internal and external teams shared access to authoritative project Geo-data, facilitating faster decision-making and accelerated timelines on critical milestones. Atlantic Shores is also using the solution to support regulatory reporting requirements, including the January 2022 submission of their Construction and Operations Plan submission to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. An industry first, this digital deliverables approach will help advance multiple industry goals, including faster regulatory review, increased transparency and improved public trust.
“Data management is a critical factor for all developers and industry stakeholders. Fugro’s Gaia.Hub platform is a valuable tool that has the potential to be used by many in the industry to improve permitting, making geo-data easier to access and more transparent,” said Liz Burdock, President and CEO of the Business Network for Offshore Wind.
Gaia.Hub technology is one of many technologies Fugro is using to support the energy transition. It follows the development and deployment of Fugro’s first set of Gaia-branded products, which were launched in 2018 to deliver geotechnical, geological and structural insights through the integration of site investigation, real-time geotechnical and structural monitoring IoT and thirdparty data.
Following the Ventus award, Andrew Cooper, Offshore Wind Lead for Fugro in the Americas, spoke in appreciation of Fugro’s partnership with Atlantic Shores on the project, “Their collaboration on the implementation of this platform was instrumental to ensuring a tailored solution that will support not only project siting and development, but can also carry through to construction, operations and maintenance. We look forward to earning the opportunity to apply Gaia.Hub to these subsequent phases and, in the meantime, we applaud their commitment to sustainability and innovation as they move the energy transition forward.”
Fugro ROAMES Bringing Innovation to Energy Infrastructure
Amid volatile energy prices and the push for greener practices, power companies are allocating greater investments to R&D to make their operations more efficient, economically viable and ecologically responsible. One subsector in particular, which is tipped to see significant growth in the coming years with an expanding number of suppliers active in the marketplace, is geodata. In the US alone, the geospatial market is projected to almost double in value, from US$59.5 billion to US$107.8 billion by 2026.
A major player pioneering innovation in the industry is Fugro, whose award-winning Remote Observation Automated Modeling Economic Simulation (ROAMES) technology, designed specifically for power utilities, creates a digital twin of such fidelity that it can be used for asset inspection, identification and condition assessment. Fugro ROAMES® offers a wide range of use-cases to clients, with value derived from cost-efficient features. These include up to 40 percent savings on vegetation management through desktop scoping, lowering the vegetation management cycle by one to two years and prioritizing critical clearances across the entire network.
What makes ROAMES a game changer, however, is that it eliminates the need to deploy inspection personnel to the field. The ROAMES digital twin allows operators and service companies to improve safety around their networks in the field, while reducing risk and total capital expenditure. The technology
combines the most innovative geospatial mapping techniques with state-of-the art data processing and cloud computing capabilities to produce a meticulously precise digital twin of a power company’s most valuable assets. Fugro, a designated AWS Energy Competency Partner, launched this first-ofits -kind revolutionary technology to the market in 2014, serving major distribution and transmission operators across Australia, the UK, Europe and North America ever since.
While many of the benefits of ROAMES are only just being understood and calculated since its adoption in other regions, its successful implementation has provided Fugro’s clients with significant OPEX savings due to shorter inspection cycles and less boots-on-the-ground work. The improved asset management policies have also reduced the time lost to accidents and other preventable incidents. Moreover, since ROAMES provides improved predictive maintenance programming, this enables clients to determine if they need to replace assets or even prolong an asset’s life cycle through early intervention or preventative measures. In addition, CAPEX has been significantly reduced.
Fugro’s Global Commercial Excellence Manager Chris Boreland outlined how the company’s product is streamlining geospatial solutions and enabling predictive programming to anticipate problems down the line. “ROAMES can be applied to digitization, digital twins and the monitoring of critical clearances around our clients’ assets. It provides our clients with the opportunity to move away from reactive asset management procedures to a proactive service, harnessing geospatial data at its core to make decisions in near real time and from the comfort of the office.”
One client that Fugro has helped to modernize its vegetation strategy is leading energy distributor Western Power Distribution (WPD), in the UK using lidar data gathered by its helicopter fleet. “The Fugro ROAMES 3D network model (digital twin) allows WPD to identify critical clearance issues such as ground clearances and vegetation intrusions to keep the network safe and operable throughout its life cycle. Fugro ROAMES uses cloud services to process, store and stream data analytics and visualizations to our clients,” said Boreland.
Traditionally, geospatial companies have focused on capturing and analyzing geospatial data to inform power companies’ engineering design programs and support digital transformation with the integration of map records into a corporate Geographic Information System (GIS). However, the industry has tended to prioritize geospatial data acquisition and delivery while neglecting higher order data such as detailed asset measurements, condition assessment, vegetation growth or other analytics. All of this has changed over the past half decade as geospatial companies started to adopt a more sophisticated approach and began to develop additional services designed to provide more analytics from remote-sensing data, such as lidar and orthoimagery. While ROAMES clients can already make use of databases across their business from vegetation management to asset management and power flow monitoring, communication between these systems and their corporate GIS is more limited. The digital twin concept now provides the capabilities to align all these systems into a single asset, which twinned to
the real-world asset allows for information to be shared across all areas of a business.
Furthermore, ROAMES is expected to play a leading role in modernizing the grid in anticipation of the eventual energy transition, as well as facilitating climate change adaptation and the construction of more sustainable infrastructure. With its “triple-A” approach, aimed at offering integrated data acquisition, analysis and advice, Fugro’s digital twin solutions have allowed both marine and land clients to reduce their carbon footprint by moving away from traditional inspection programs to employ digital inspection programs, which merge disparate data sources to foster more informed decision making.
For instance, the physics-based, high accuracy 3D network model of a clients’ conductors and poles allows weather, network load and conductor material to be input and used to simulate the conductor sag and swing under different conditions. Together with a full-scale 3D network of a client’s asset portfolio, Fugro also models the environment surrounding the assets, which can later be used to inform critical clearances, vegetation intrusions and the spatial accuracy of a clients’ GIS schematic. By providing these analytics, Fugro enables utility clients to implement digital inspection programs helping to reduce their carbon footprint, inspection cycles and OPEX costs.
In addition, Fugro has made available ROAMES World for visualization of the digital twin and ROAMES Analytics, which is required to improve asset measurement efforts and risk assessments. ROAMES World is a virtual world asset management platform built in the cloud – a high-performance 3D mapping environment that offers access to accurate, trustworthy and comprehensive information that helps understand real-world context and thereby facilitate more informed, efficient and easier management of assets.
With data records nearly in the millions, an asset register and any associated spatial data is typically too large to analyze at scale using traditional GIS or enterprise systems alone. As a result, it is difficult or impossible to detect broad trends, rapidly investigate an outlier or share access with users in any location. ROAMES addresses this need by offering a highperformance data investigation tool with a simple, intuitive interface.
This allows users to obtain answers faster, which is critical for an optimized approach to asset and vegetation management. Maintaining conductor clearance is an important safety and compliance issue and by precisely managing and monitoring the location of assets in the ROAMES digital twin, power utility maintenance programs can be more effectively managed to mitigate risk.
Fugro is the world’s leading geodata specialist. By continuing to evolve and improve the accuracy and speed of the data delivered to its clients, the company is well placed to remain at the forefront of the geospatial market. Just recently, Fugro has sought to harness the power of AI and cloud computing to fully automate and speed up its processes through digitization of its acquisition and processing workflows.
Fugro Aims to Help Save the World’s Oceans Using Geodata
Fugro, the world’s leading geodata specialist, has become a global benchmark within the private sector for its environmental efforts, not only because its services help clients design, build and operate assets safely and sustainably but also because it has partnered with key international institutions to contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Over the years, Fugro has found itself with great impetus in today’s market, since its solutions and services address some of the world’s top priorities and concerns, such as promoting a clean energy transition, building sustainable infrastructure and mitigating climate change. Fugro´s sustainable offerings contribute especially to five of the 17 SDGs, where the company considers its positive impact most meaningful. These SDGs are: SDG 7 affordable and clean energy; SDG 9 industry, innovation and infrastructure; SDG 11 sustainable cities and communities, SDG 14 life below water; and SDG 15 life on land.
In regard to the SDG 15, Fugro has been actively working to minimize the impact on terrestrial ecosystems and land degradation through sustainable designs and water management consultancies. In 2021, the company assessed the impact of its activities on biodiversity in an effort to continue implementing mitigation measures in its offerings.
SDG 14, which seeks to conserve and sustainably use marine resources in oceans and seas, is one of the areas where most of Fugro’s environmental efforts have been directed. Over the years, the company has offered leading support for initiatives aimed at providing key missing data that will help improve ocean research. The most comprehensive of these initiatives is the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (Ocean Decade), which develops a global framework for ocean science data that will allow countries to have better conditions for sustainable ocean development as well as restore the oceans ecosystems. A second, complementary initiative is The Nippon FoundationGEBCO Seabed 2030 Project, whose purpose is to complete the mapping of the world’s oceans by 2030 and promotes the compilation of all bathymetric data in the GEBCO Ocean Map.
As an example of the company’s level of commitment to the goals of SDG 14, Fugro is partnering with the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (IOC-UNESCO) to actively support the Ocean Decade. Under this partnership, and as a member of the Ocean Decade Alliance, Fugro is helping to lead two key working groups: the Data Coordination Group is focused on the development and implementation of an Ocean Decade Data Strategy to improve the way global ocean science data is accessed and shared, and the Corporate Data Group is focused on creating frameworks and mechanism to unlock privately owned ocean data for the benefit of humanity.
IOC-UNESCO Executive Secretary Dr. Vladimir Ryabinin stated, “IOC and Fugro may be different kinds of organizations, one intergovernmental, one commercial, but we share the same ultimate goal, which is to bring ocean science and surveys to the service of the people. Not only does IOC appreciate the possibility to capitalize on Fugro’s technological leadership and expertise in ocean Geo-data; the most important element for IOC in working closely with Fugro on the Ocean Decade is their leadership in opening data to the world, offering an unprecedented example for the private sector. IOC is a standard-setting organization in ocean science and data, and Fugro is setting a new golden standard in moving towards making ocean data a common good.”
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“It is critical that the private sector help lead this global initiative. We collectively have much to offer and gain from a sustainable and equitable ocean economy,” said Mark Heine, CEO of Fugro. Terry McConnell, a digital transformation expert with Fugro who has provided leadership to the IOCUNESCO partnership adds: “It is not about what we can get out of it. It is about why we should be doing this as a good corporate citizen and as good individual citizens.”
