The UK’s National Subsea Research Institute was formally launched at Subsea UK’s 2009 annual conference among huge promise, but has the NSRI started to deliver?
Broadly, the answer appears to be yes, though like most collaborative endeavours, progress has not been as rapid as planned for the Aberdeen University-based initiative.
A key objective for 2009 was to secure 20 blue-chip or flagship companies to become members and work in a partnership with academia to co-ordinate and deliver a national research strategy.
“We haven’t been quite as successful as we had hoped,” said business manager Mark Critchley.
“I’m disappointed by the way the economic climate has affected things. We only managed to sign up 17 of our target 20 members in our first year.
“But in terms of confidence going forward, I’m hopeful that we will recruit the final three of the 20 before Subsea 2010 kicks off this month.” .
Critchley told Energy that NSRI was in with a good chance of hitting 20 by then. However, the important thing was that the institute had already achieved a good spread of companies from across the supply chain.
While it is currently dominated by companies in the Scottish north-east, inroads are being made elsewhere, notably on Tyneside.
“And the companies that we hope will join by February would beef up at operator and service-company level, and we hope we can recruit a company that’s big in control systems … that’s a bit of a gap at the moment,” said Critchley.
So what is top of the list for attention during 2010?
Critchley says there are three fundamental objectives that NSRI needs to achieve.
One is to strengthen industry buy-in. The second is to develop a co-ordinated, prioritised research programme. And the third is to assure and build funding.
“We’ve spent the last six to eight months talking with our members about where their real perceptions of the challenges lie with regard to how one can make the UK subsea sector more successful as a technological leader in international terms; and also increasing market share,” said Critchley.
“We developed a number of themes early-2009 that were finalised in the summer and were focused on where the academic competencies of the universities involved lie. We’ve now matched those against where the priorities for the industry are, and we’re focusing principally on four key technology areas.
“The first one is what I call intelligent condition and control … effectively looking at autonomous and computational systems to improve condition monitoring and automatic control systems for subsea.
“The idea is that these will help improve reliability for existing fields; also act as enabling technologies to develop fields in remote environments … deepwater, far offshore, Arctic … those sorts of scenarios.
“The second area is in autonomous subsea power. Again, this is coming out of two things … the need to try to minimise capex costs for long umbilicals, and power lines. So we’re looking at how we can use academic expertise to generate ideas for providing power locally using renewables-type technologies, but deepwater and far offshore.
“The third is novel materials, but in the sense that they are novel in a subsea environment. This is about alternative materials, especially substitutes for steel. The focus is on improving reliability, reducing costs, making things stronger and lighter, again emphasising deepwater.
“The fourth area is where the industry wants us, as academics, to focus on the real blue-skies stuff … radical ideas about how we might do things differently.
“The industry wants us to think completely out of the box; something as radical as, is there an alternative to pipelines? What does one do if umbilicals are done away with?”
As for funding, Critchley explained that one of the reasons why NSRI was set up by Subsea UK and the British-based subsea industry was the perception that the sector itself already funds a lot of research.
However, because of the commercial imperative, it tends to be short-term – looking at fixing today’s problems tomorrow, not several years off. With rare exceptions, the industry is loath to self-fund long-term R&D.
Critchley: “What we’re looking to do at NSRI as an academic unit is to bring in additional funding to do research on behalf of the subsea industry, but that it’s research that would be more traditionally academic … focusing on fundamental scientific and engineering challenges.
“Our target is that we’re trying to increase the amount of funding available for subsea-sector research by a factor of five over the next three to five years.
“Consider just the universities involved in NSRI. Take the average of what we would normally do per year over the last five to 10 years. We’re looking at increasing from £3million to £15million a year … that’s our target.
“We’re really looking to bring in new money that isn’t necessarily coming from industry itself so that universities and other sources can be seen to be recognising the value of subsea to the UK and Scottish economies.”
There are currently four universities on board – Aberdeen, RGU, Dundee and Newcastle. Collectively, they offer a pool of some 120 academics with skills that are relevant. Of those, about 50 are showing interest in the activities of NSRI.
As for who helms the institute, Professor Albert Roger is expected to remain in command, at least for the remainder of 2010.
The post of research director has been advertised and is about to be re-advertised. This is the key position in terms of moving things forward.
“We want to be very sure that we appoint the right person,” said Critchley.
“We’ve advertised, sought to appoint and have chosen not to, based on the most recent round. So the post is about to be re-advertised. We have an interim candidate and are looking to re-advertise in the next three to six months.
“That person has the opportunity to move the programme along; and also apply for the post itself.”
In any business, there are obviously critical issues. As far as Critchley is concerned, the big one is ensuring that NSRI gains significant traction this year – that the membership grows, that existing members feel they are getting value and that the research strategy and projects get moving and ramp up rapidly.
“It’s critical we move forward and develop the research programme so there is a long-term impact, but at the same time, give our membership early evidence that they are gaining value out of that membership.
“That value might not be economic. It could be networking, identifying possible solutions to future challenges … that sort of thing.”
