Subsea firm wins R&D funding
5 Aug 2013
Subsea control and instrumentation specialist Tracerco today secured funding to help it build a new £8.6 million research base in Teesside.
The Johnson Matthey-owned firm secured £1 million from the Government’s Regional Growth Fund to help build its research and development facility called the Measurement Technology Centre.
The Centre will include an underwater testing tank, essential for the development of Tracerco’s growing range of subsea products and services for the oil and gas industry.
Earlier this summer Tracerco launched the world’s first subsea CT scanner for flowlines. The Tracerco Discovery scans pipelines from the outside to gain an accurate picture of the condition in the pipe and the flow, with no need to remove the protective coating, and with no interruption to production.
It was developed in cooperation with Statoil, and Tracerco claims the CT scanner is a more cost-effective way to provide operators assurance of the integrity of unpiggable coated pipelines than competing technologies such as ultrasonic and pulsed eddy current. It provides a 360 degree, high resolution scan of pipeline contents and pipe wall thickness in real time, with defect resolution of 1-2mm.
