Aubin has opened discussions with Norwegian and UK interests following successful West Coast trials with its LiquiBuoy gel bag-based subsea lifting system.
However, subsea business director Serina Alif told Energy that it is too early to determine where the discussions might lead or when and where related trials might take place.
The Ellon company is fresh from successful trials with the system at the Underwater Centre, Fort William, where it was deployed handling a 300kg subsea spool piece unit, also a steel clump weight of three tonnes in water depths to 100m.
The spool-piece weighing was handled working with two five-tonne capacity bags and manoeuvred using a remotely operated vehicle.
Alif said that even seasoned ROV operators were surprised as to how responsive the LiquiBuoy system proved to be throughout the Fort William trials.
“The engineering team were faced with and overcame technical environmental difficulties to successfully perform the lifting operations,” said Alif.
“Our liquid buoyancy rendered the spool piece neutrally buoyant and allowed the ROV to manoeuvre the hardware vertically and horizontally with ease.”
Typically done with heave-compensated cranes or air bags, raising or lowering loads in a safe and controlled manner is the main challenge in subsea lifting or deployment.
However, air bags are difficult to control and, in years gone by, salvage divers have even resorted to using oil-filled bags instead to gain better control during recovery operations.
Besides opening discussions with the interested parties, Alif said Aubin was now pressing ahead with developing a family of calibrated bags as the next step in bringing the company’s lifting innovation to market.