Fugro’s Award-Winning Expertise at OTC 2018

Fugro is making its mark on the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) this year with 14 presentations in the technical programme. Involving 32 of its global experts, Fugro is taking part in six conference sessions throughout the show as presenter or collaborator, and for one session, provides the chairperson. The collaborators come from Fugro’s worldwide locations including USA, Mexico and UK. Also present in the main exhibition hall, the company is displaying its services for marine asset integrity and marine site characterisation on booth 1604.

Even before it is presented, one of the Fugro-authored papers - ‘A Novel Approach to Generating a Hurricane Database for the Gulf of Mexico Based on Numerical Weather Prediction Models’ - has been announced as the winner of the 2018 Arthur Lubinski OTC Best Paper Award, by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Petroleum Division.

The award-winning paper
Selected from hundreds of OTC 2018 submissions, the paper is recognised as having a significant impact on the offshore industry. The team responsible (from Fugro’s Wallingford, UK Houston, USA and Mexico offices)- Juan Liria, Principal Metocean Modeller in Fugro’s Metocean Modelling and Analysis Department (who will be presenting the award-winning paper), Henrique Coelho, Dave Sproson, Paulo Martinho, Cody Webb, Fernando Oropeza, Jill Bradon, Rosemary Smith and Zhong Peng - has spent eighteen months working on the project.

Being delivered on Monday 30th April in the ‘Digital Revolution and Data Technology Reshaping Offshore’ session, the paper has, as a backdrop, the scarce availability of public metocean data in the south of the Gulf of Mexico. It describes how an accurate hurricane modelling approach has been used to generate a valuable new source of data to assist development in the region.

“Hurricanes are significant concerns when building offshore infrastructure. To optimise construction costs, it is vital to know their frequency as well as the expected wind intensities, wave size and other vital parameters at the project site,” Juan Liria explains. “In situ measurements during hurricanes are scarce, and if they are available, they rarely cover a large enough number of events to enable the derivation of statistically robust and reliable design criteria.”

Thanks to high levels of computational power and technical expertise, Fugro has taken traditional methods a considerable step further and developed the capability to model the complex atmospheric conditions during hurricanes (and similar events, known collectively as tropical revolving storms). “We can accurately reproduce the tracks and intensities of historical storms, together with important related elements such as convection, gravity, waves, storm surge and convective precipitation, among others,” he continues.

After presenting the paper Juan will be on the Fugro booth (1604) to discuss the new high quality, cost effective alternative to traditional services and to demonstrate the Gulf of Mexico hurricane database in detail.

A wide range of Fugro presentations take place in the following sessions: ‘Advances in Mooring Technology’; ‘Digital Revolution and Data Technology Reshaping Offshore’; ‘Recent Advances in Geotechnics’; ‘Geohazard and Geotechnical Challenges: Engineering Solutions for Today and Tomorrow’ (which sees Fugro’s Principal Geoscientist, Kerry Campbell co-chairing); Marine Mining (‘Search for MH370: New Geologic Insights Revealed through the Integrational of Multiple Geophysical Datasets’); and Metocean Advances.

A second recognition
During OTC Fugro will also be recognised by NOAA for its contributions to the NF-GEBCO Seabed 2030 project and its continuing commitment to the global initiative to produce a definitive, high-resolution bathymetric map of the entire world’s ocean floor by the year 2030. The initiative is being facilitated by the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) project in partnership with The Nippon Foundation (NF) as a means to inform global policy, improve sustainable use and advance scientific research.