Since the beginning of the 1990's, the progressive improvement of the GPS satellite configuration has driven massive increase in GPS usage within the oil industry. Nevertheless, many companies were still reluctant to rely solely on DGPS as a positioning system in operations where continuous high quality positioning was required such as two and three dimensional seismic. A number of DGPS systems in the market had not yet proven themselves, and there was still an uncertainty whether the U.S. military could block civilian access to GPS at short notice, thus causing problems and down-time in expensive and complex offshore operations. However, as the first oil companies crossed this 'psycological barrier' and started running operations with DGPS as primary and sole positioning system, others soon followed and DGPS quickly came to dominate the surface positioning market. This resulted in most alternative surface radio navigation systems being phased out one by one. This paper discusses aspects of offshore GPS positioning and presents some special application of GPS technology as represented by Shell experiences in the North Sea and Atlantic margin regions. As far as positioning is concerned, the multitude of activities in these areas are quite representative for the conditions and challenges faced in other parts of the world. Finally, some findings are presented from a research project carried out to verify positioning procedures used by the DGPS vendors providing services to the offshore industry.
Satellite navigation in offshore technology
1998
11 Seiten, 4 Bilder
Conference paper
English
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