Oil and defence industries collaborate on underwater technology

A collaboration between the oil and gas and defence industries aimed at developing new underwater technologies has been launched for the first time.

Industry body Subsea UK and the UK Defence Solutions Centre will work on areas such as robotics, unmanned operations and digital communications.

It is hoped it could lead to benefits for sectors such as oil and gas, renewable energy and deep sea mining.

A memorandum of understanding (MoU) has been signed.

Subsea UK's technology arm, the National Subsea Research Initiative (NSRI), will be involved in the project with the UKDSC.

'Mutual benefit'

Neil Gordon, chief executive of Subsea UK, said: "This cross-industry collaboration is the result of 18 months work to explore the best approach to derive maximum mutual benefit for both sectors.

"Digitalisation is bringing forward a number of technological solutions we could only have dreamed of before and will help revolutionise our industry.

"There will be areas in which the defence sector is more advanced than oil and gas and vice versa, but this collaboration opens up a channel of communication and co-operation which will pave the way for us to carry out focussed, in-depth research and achieve the previously unimaginable."

Andrew Cunningham, executive director for innovation at UKDSC, added: "This partnership will allow for knowledge to be shared between two well-developed industries in a way that we've never done before."