How AI is cleaning the ocean

Off­shore wind pow­er has rapid­ly ascend­ed the ranks of ener­gy sources in the past decade. Its growth is expect­ed to con­tin­ue, with gen­er­a­tion capac­i­ty pre­dict­ed to soar from 35GW to 234GW over the next 10 years, accord­ing to the Glob­al Wind Ener­gy Coun­cil (GWEC), which ranks the UK, Ger­many and Chi­na as the largest nation­al mar­kets.

Off­shore wind is prov­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly pop­u­lar in gov­ern­ments’ ener­gy strate­gies, giv­en the plum­met­ing cost of pro­vi­sion and the fact that tur­bines can be placed ever fur­ther out to sea. As a result, the GWEC pre­dicts the com­pound annu­al growth rate of off­shore wind gen­er­a­tion over the next five years to be near­ly 32%, com­pared with 0.3% for land-based tur­bines.

Advances in wind gen­er­a­tion are cru­cial to nations’ efforts to decar­bonise their economies and reduce their envi­ron­men­tal impact. But a prob­lem has emerged: the exten­sive work required to main­tain off­shore struc­tures, giv­en the stress on them exact­ed by the seas, is cre­at­ing sur­pris­ing­ly high lev­els of pol­lu­tion.

This has arisen from the need to send out large ships, which car­ry the sub­sea robots that are used through­out the year to mon­i­tor struc­tur­al aspects of the tur­bines, includ­ing the integri­ty of cables and the extent of seabed scour around foun­da­tions. These ves­sels are often crewed by up to 60 peo­ple, from engi­neers and robot dri­vers to cooks and clean­ers.
Their impacts are enor­mous, reports Bri­an Allen, founder and CEO of marine tech­nol­o­gy busi­ness Vaarst. “The ves­sels, which cost £1m to £10m a month to oper­ate, depend­ing on the job, will emit 275,000 tonnes of car­bon over their life­times. This is some­thing the indus­try is push­ing to change quick­ly,” he says.

Oil and gas sup­pli­ers also use these high­ly pol­lut­ing ships to mon­i­tor their key marine assets and con­duct sub­sea sur­veys. They too are urgent­ly seek­ing ways to reduce the ves­sels’ envi­ron­men­tal impact. Until recent­ly, there was lit­tle that they could do in this respect. But, in the past few years, the mat­u­ra­tion of cut­ting-edge sys­tems has set in motion a vast trans­for­ma­tion, remov­ing their need for the ships.

“Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, 3D vision and autonomous robot­ics have been at the heart of the change, empow­er­ing the rapid removal of these large ves­sels,” Allen says. “This is essen­tial to cut­ting envi­ron­men­tal impacts while increas­ing effi­cien­cy.”

The use of these tech­nolo­gies is catalysing the growth of off­shore wind gen­er­a­tion by reduc­ing its costs dra­mat­i­cal­ly and help­ing the sec­tor to deliv­er on the promise of a min­i­mal envi­ron­men­tal impact. This has cre­at­ed a vir­tu­ous cycle: as the cost of pro­duc­ing each kilo­watt using off­shore wind falls, invest­ment and pol­i­cy sup­port grows. This enables larg­er wind farms to be cre­at­ed, there­by achiev­ing economies of scale, which in turn makes clean ener­gy cheap­er for con­sumers. The instal­la­tions are also cre­at­ing bio­di­verse shal­low reefs around them.

“Off­shore wind farms are turn­ing to AI, remov­ing the need for mas­sive inspec­tion costs and hun­dreds of hours of exam­i­na­tion,” Allen says. “In the com­ing years, ful­ly auto­mat­ed ves­sels will become avail­able. In the oil and gas sec­tor, this tech­nol­o­gy will also be essen­tial in the process of decom­mis­sion­ing old­er assets more rapid­ly.”

Some of the most suc­cess­ful off­shore ener­gy firms work with Vaarst, which pro­vides cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy for under­wa­ter AI. The Vaarst 3D vision sys­tem enables the rapid col­lec­tion of data from sub­sea robots, as well as drones and climb­ing robots that work above the water­line, with real-time stream­ing to con­nect­ed devices any­where in the world.
The company’s machine learn­ing deliv­ers rapid and action­able analy­sis to oper­a­tors, with tri­als already in place with oil super-majors, and ful­ly com­mer­cial autonomous sub­sea robots are expect­ed to pro­to­type soon, says Allen, who adds: “Pow­er­ful AI tech­nol­o­gy is help­ing wind farms and oil busi­ness­es to become much more effi­cient and far less pol­lut­ing. This will be vital to achiev­ing envi­ron­men­tal tar­gets, help­ing coun­tries through their clean ener­gy tran­si­tion.”

Vaarst, which is short­ly start­ing a series B fund­ing round, is prof­itable and has back­ing from sus­tain­able equi­ty investors, ven­ture cap­i­tal firms and ener­gy com­pa­nies.
Allen expects that, giv­en the growth of the tech­nol­o­gy and the mul­ti-tril­lion-dol­lar address­able marine ener­gy and sub­sea inter­net mar­ket, Vaarst will dou­ble its rev­enue again to £25m next year and con­tin­ue grow­ing at that sort of pace. “We’re aim­ing to become one of the UK’s uni­corns, with a bil­lion-dol­lar val­u­a­tion with­in the next three to four years,” he says.

Off­shore ener­gy busi­ness­es con­tin­ue to be par­tic­u­lar­ly active in using Vaarst’s tech­nol­o­gy because of its adap­ta­tion to pop­u­lar remote-oper­at­ed under­wa­ter robots and the appli­ca­tion of true autonomous AI to deliv­er ever larg­er effi­cien­cies.
There is also strong poten­tial to apply the tech­nol­o­gy to oth­er sec­tors, as Allen explains: “These sys­tems have been bat­tle-test­ed in the sea, one of the world’s harsh­est envi­ron­ments. While marine is our focus, we could also imag­ine using the tech­nol­o­gy on land in the near future. The visu­al­i­sa­tion and data flow, the machine-learn­ing analy­sis and the automa­tion are all applic­a­ble to con­struc­tion and oth­er land-based indus­tri­al set­tings.”

It’s clear that AI has a key role to play in clean­ing the ocean by deliv­er­ing more effi­cient green­er ener­gy and reduc­ing the use of high­ly pol­lut­ing ships. As off­shore ener­gy sup­pli­ers increas­ing­ly take up 3D vision and machine-learn­ing analy­sis while prepar­ing to intro­duce ful­ly auto­mat­ed ves­sels, they will cre­ate much health­i­er seas and achieve sus­tain­able ener­gy pro­duc­tion that will meet the world’s grow­ing demands.

To find out more about how AI is clean­ing the ocean, vis­it vaarst.com

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