SUN AND WIND LEND A HAND
Surfboard-shaped solar panel provides electricity to undersea equipment
The technology was certainly innovative, using the sun to power environmental monitoring systems. But it wasn’t gadgetry that drew one of the biggest crowds on the exhibition floor of the Offshore Technology Conference. It was the look. In this case, it looked like a surfboard. The Wave Glider, a joint venture of Schlumberger by Houston-based Liquid Robotics, is a surfboard-shaped solar panel that stays at the water’s surface, connected by a cord to another piece of equipment that monitors environmental factors below sea level. It can stay in the water, unmanned, for about a year, as long as it has sunlight to charge, waves to propel it forward and at least 8 meters of water depth.
“One of the very well-established technologies out there is a surfboard,” said Liquid Robotics Managing Direc-
tor Sudhir Pai, who developed the technology. “There have been a bunch of times a surfboard has gone out, gotten beaten up or chipped, and in spite of that, it never loses its integrity. You’ve never heard of a surfer falling off because his surfboard broke.”
Oil and gas companies can use the Wave Glider to detect hydrocarbons, check how a rig would fare in a deep-water environment before it is deployed offshore, or monitor the migration patterns of humpback whales.
The company has 29 Wave Gliders in the water now, with two off Ghana and 27 in the Gulf of Mexico. Another, of course, was attracting notice at OTC.
The bright blue 300-pound surfboard has been a hit at the OTC for the past three years. (An earlier model was yellow, but the color attracted sharks in the water.)
“I’ve seen the excitement go from, ‘ Wow, is this really oil field equipment?’ ’’ Pai said, “to discussing seriously the applications where it does work.”
The technology is one of several offering costeffective alternatives to manned vessels traditionally used for environmental monitoring. Pai said the Wave Glider’s advantage is it stays at surface level at all times, so companies know where it is.
Wave Gliders have been used in 32 operations by 14 clients, Pai said. One stayed in the water for 15 months, and another traveled 9,200 miles from California to Australia, at an average speed of 1 knot. Since the product was launched, Wave Gliders have spent a total of 3,486 days at sea.
As for the model at the NRG Center, it only has a few more days on land left to go.