Higher efficiency through improved diver transportation

Abstract

The quest for new oil and gas fields has taken the oil companies into areas of great depths and hostile environments To make the exploitation of these findings possible, there is a need for new and advanced technology The distance between the surface support and the diver is increasing This adds to the technical difficulties and drastically lessens the margins for the diver lifesupport systems This calls for new philosophies in many of the problem areas and perhaps totally new concepts for their solution Attempts to obtain increased surface independence have led to the development of so-called flying bells These are diving bells free from guide wires and equipped with thrusters in order to give horizontal manoeuvrability In the near future we will also meet the large autonomous submarine 'Saga', a mix between the old concept of a stationary habitat and a lock-out submersible as it occurred in the early 1970s This chapter intends to describe the pros and cons of these systems and to compare them with the conventional diver transportation systems This will not be done by a precise statistical method, but rather by analysis of a systematically collected interview material We shall try to show the potential of this kind of analysis and hopefully be able to continue to make similar studies of offshore diving.