Long Term Underwater Positioning Technologies for the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry

The current trends in the offshore oil and gas industry are to explore and develop resources in increasingly deeper areas, whilst reducing the basic costs involved. The oil and gas industry is often seen as a fertile market by pushing and pulling the use of technology and by creating opportunities for engineers to develop new and innovative techniques to solve long-standing problems, whilst improving efficiency and costs. Acoustic and non-acoustic technologies, for positioning and tracking underwater, are available now but their adoption may be slow. Some examples of recent innovative solutions for the long term wide area coverage of underwater positioning are provided to promote comment and discussion.