Services >Offshore >Fibre Optic, Power Cable and Pipeline Surveys

EGS is a global player in submarine cable surveys, which include both Geophysical and Burial Assessment Surveys. To date, EGS has undertaken over 70% of the Asian submarine cable route surveying covering in the order of 100,000km of route surveying. EGS now offers, through its alliance a global solution to the telecommunications industry. EGS, together with its partners, has demonstrated an outstanding track record of successfully completing such multi-disciplinary surveys as is evident form our Qualification statement.

Marine route surveys and Burial Assessment Surveys for submarine fibre optic telecommunications cables, power cables and subsea pipelines are characterised by the need to integrate a multitude of engineering and scientific disciplines (from the Desk Top Study, through the Survey and Final Report, to installation and maintenance considerations). A dedicated experienced project manager is appointed to supervise the diverse array of professionals that are tasked with fulfilling these stringent requirements.

There are a multitude of considerations in affecting a proper installation, including:

• seabed topography and geology.
• oceanography.
• economic uses of the sea and seabed and any possible third party intervention.
• cable or pipeline engineering.
• political and cultural issues impacting the route.

It is essential that all these key issues are properly identified and ameliorated against before installation proceeds. An accurate and pertinent survey report that encompasses a relevant burial assessment will have huge upstream savings during the cable installation. Historically, cable installations have paid little attention to route surveying. This has resulted directly in costly installation delays and in some instances non-compliances.
EGS has designed stringent ISO-9000 compliant QC procedures and propriety equipment to optimise the stringent requirements of route surveying. These include the development of a digital geophysical acquisition, processing and charting system that helps the onboard geoscientist provide a detailed draft chart to the onboard client representative typically within 24 hours of data acquisition. High speed data links on the survey boat enable both EGS and the client to optimise communications, thereby reducing costly standby.

The EGS Burial Assessment Survey (BAS) is usually compiled and incorporated into the final Survey Report. The geotechnical information for the BAS is obtained from a variety of sources including MCPT and gravity coring information. This equipment is usually operated from the main offshore survey vessel after the completion of a geophysical survey block, thereby vastly reducing costs of running an additional stand-alone BAS vessel.

The innovative BAS methodology adopts a holistic approach where we not only consider the geotechnical data from sampling and MCPT, but also merge it with our continuous geophysical and bathymetric data. This is only the start. Just as importantly, we also incorporate other information collected from the Desk Top Study, from the survey observations as well as the EGS database. Once we have been provided with the burial tool specifications for the job an experienced cable installation person further refines the BAS so that potential areas of difficulty that may be encountered during the installation are brought to their attention by someone whom is acutely aware of what the installation needs are.