Norway’s oil and gas company Vår Energi has selected software developer Vissim to implement upgraded oil spill detection technology at its assets on the Norwegian continental shelf.

The agreement will see Vissim install new and upgraded oil spill detection solution at Vår Energi’s operations including the Balder production, storage and offloading vessel (FPSO) and the Ringhorne processing platform.

The Vissim’s cloud-based upgraded oil spill detection solution is designed to comply with the highest IT security standards.

Vissim North Sea operations director Håvard Odden said: “We are installing a cost effective solution, reusing hardware already installed, that significantly enhances the quality of the oil spill monitoring.”

Operators are mandated to have oil spill monitoring and detection technologies that collectively render them independent of weather conditions, as per regulatory requirement for oil spill monitoring and detection.

Vissim said that all installations on the Norwegian continental shelf feature radar technology for vessel tracking.

The Vissim’s two-in-one solution is designed to allow both vessel tracking and oil spill detection using the same radar.

The image processing technology usually used by radar-based oil spill detection systems often produces false alarms, allowing operators to manually monitor and respond to. These false alerts are caused by events including heavy rain and vessel wake.

Vissim said its radar-based solution makes use of upgraded image processing technology to detect even more.

Odden added: “The new system has much higher sensitivity which means that it will detect smaller oil spills.

“It capitalises on machine learning and artificial intelligence, which means that the amount of false alarms will drastically decrease which in turn means less stress on operators. This increases the reliability of the oil spill detection system while it also reduces operators’ costs.”