The advancement of offshore and ocean energy technologies is shifting focus towards sustainable energy systems integration while balancing the net-zero GHG emissions. These developments of offshore wind, tidal, and wave technologies serves as either a complement to, or a substitute for, traditional oil and gas systems. With the integration of offshore renewable energy technologies, there has been a rise in the development of operational inspection and monitoring, impact assessment, carbon-neutral operational performance, and the resilience and longevity of assets. Renewable technologies, such as those advancing offshore wind, tidal, and wave systems, contrast with traditional offshore systems, which operate in dynamic marine environments. In contrast, mature hydrocarbon offshore platforms often face data deserts. The integration of the external systems’ photogrammetry, remote sensing, digital twinning, and AVs creates a versatile solution for inspection. However, poor data quality, lack of data standardization, and lack of standard interoperability frameworks pose key challenges to monitoring. The carbon emission monitoring due to net-zero policy ship emissions, in addition to the operational energy usage, poses regrettable emissions, undermining the operational sustainability goal. The shifts in operational energy usage and vessel carbon emissions impact reliability as well. Offshore assets are highly exposed to extreme climate events, biofouling, and other climate impacts. Predictive analytics, through Machine Learning, is being sought to estimate the failures to optimize the inspection intervals while aligning with DOE and DHS frameworks. It remains difficult to merge conventional oil and gas inspection techniques with new low-carbon, data-driven approaches suited for renewable infrastructures. This review underscores the necessity for internationally unified monitoring protocols, carbon-neutral inspection processes, and complementary lifecycle assessments to preserve the technical dependability and sustainability of renewable offshore systems. The offshore energy industry, for example, would be able to fully offset any operational emissions, become more resilient, and meet global net-zero targets faster. They would achieve this faster if the challenges related to sustainability and dependability were addressed simultaneously.
Wegner et al. (Sun,) studied this question.