Subsea innovation (illus. courtesy PanGeo Subsea)

Showing there’s no “right or wrong time” for technology investments, Chevron Technology Ventures and oil-industry venture-capital investor Lime Rock Partners have made a “muli-million-dollar” commitment to PanGeo Subsea, maker of acoustic imaging technology.

More acoustic-imaging products is believed possible, and PanGeo has a record of “3D and 4D” successes.

Canada based PanGeo’s Acoustic Corer is recently on the market and it’s Sub-Bottom Imager is due out later this year. Another company product, Acoustic Zoom, is a recent innovation dubbed “the next generation of geophysical technologies”.

But with natural gas believed abundant deep in the earth’s strat, it’s perhaps the company’s deep earth telescope that raises eyebrows. It’ll be capable of high-resolution acoustic images of things six kilometres beneath the seabed, or five to ten times greater than conventional 3D and 4D seismic survey tools.

Survey tools are also being developed to appraise the seabed for anchored wind turbines, minerals and the military.

The investor money will pave the way for expanding from an operations office in Stavanger to opening sales in Aberdeen, Denmark, Houston, Brazil,and South East Asia to meet “ anticipated demand”.

PanGeo started in 2006 by Canadian engineering talent storehouses Guigné International Ltd. and Pan Maritime Energy Services Inc. with the Norwegian start-up capital of Energy Ventures AS.

Tags: PanGeo Subsea