Most existing ocean developments are lone platforms, 100 m or more in edge length, accessing hydrocarbons (oil, gas or both) from a reservoir deep beneath the ocean floor. In contrast offshore renewable energy developments can require more than a 100 structures over hundreds of square kilometres owing to the lower energy yield per structure for offshore renewables compared with hydrocarbons. In other words, more structures are needed to meet the same energy demand. With specialist offshore site investigation (SI) vessel day rates of many tens of thousands of pounds, time offshore must be minimized without compromising the quality of data to make ocean development more competitive.

Activities within Research Goal 1 ¡®Characterisation¡¯ focus on development of new tools and protocols to efficiently and accurately characterise the seabed environment that are critical to provide the engineering parameters for design of any structure to be placed in the ocean, without the need for a costly geotechnical site investigation vessel and without placing crew offshore.