Deep water repair welding and hot tapping (DEEPIT)

Steel pipelines represent today the most important infrastructure for transport of oil and gas to onshore facilities in Norway and Europe. Up to now, subsea pipeline tie-ins and repair have been carried out with the assistance of divers. The recent trend is that oil and gas are explored at deeper waters which impose an extreme challenge for both weld repair and hot tapping. It has been decided that diver assisted operations will not be used below 180 metre sea depth. This means that fully automatic remotely controlled welding equipment must be developed if welding becomes the chosen joining process.

In the present project, basic knowledge will be built to be able to carry out future deep water repair welding and hot tapping, incorporating education of 2PhDs.