Environmental Data from the Deep Sea
Interview with Onno Bliss, Managing Director of K.U.M. Umwelt- und Meerestechnik Kiel GmbH
Important treasures are waiting to be lifted from the seabed: data for earthquake and climate research, but increasingly also for industrial customers, especially in the area of Carbon Capture and Storage. How K.U.M. Umwelt- und Meerestechnik Kiel GmbH wants to leverage its oceaneering expertise in all these segments was revealed by Managing Director Onno Bliss in the interview.
Wirtschaftsforum: Mr. Bliss, your company acts as a specialist for unique depths in the market - as your products are primarily used at the seabed.
Onno Bliss: Under the term Oceaneering, we are engaged in engineering services that make oceanographic sensors offshore-ready. We thus produce a wide range of underwater data collection devices that have primarily been used by scientific institutes in climate or earthquake research.
Wirtschaftsforum: How does that work exactly?
Onno Bliss: Our devices are deployed by ship at the destination and record data there for about two years. Afterwards, they can be pinged using an acoustic signal and then surface again, where they are finally recovered. These device carriers can be equipped with a variety of sensors to collect a wide range of data on temperature and flow measurement and numerous other metrics in the deep sea. KUM has numerous systems for data collection underwater. These range from biological samplers to geophysical sensors.
Wirtschaftsforum: In addition to scientific institutions, you have increasingly targeted customers from the private sector with your product portfolio - what growth segments are you specifically focusing on?
Onno Bliss: A key application area we see is in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). This involves pressing CO2 into existing geological reservoirs, from which raw materials had previously been extracted. Naturally, this process must be meticulously monitored to precisely understand potential hazards and to quickly respond to related changes in ecosystems if necessary. In this delicate field of environmental monitoring lies a growing core competence of our company, which we would now like to bring to this area as well. Moreover, we see infrastructure security monitoring as an important application field for our Oceaneering know-how, where our equipment can be used to monitor critical infrastructure on the seabed, such as pipelines or telecommunication cables.
Wirtschaftsforum: What technological innovations are you currently working on?
Onno Bliss: We are currently developing a new modular Ocean-Bottom-Seismometer-System, which we are largely targeting specifically for the Carbon-Capture-and-Storage market. It consists of modular autonomous components that can autonomously record geophysical data over a three-year period: These data can then either be sent to buoys via acoustic modems or read optically, by an underwater vehicle autonomously approaching the respective nodes. This eliminates the need for costly retrieval of the respective sensor. If real-time monitoring is required for the specific application area, periodic data packets can even be sent to the buoy or land via an undersea cable, so there is no delay between data recording and processing. The modular structure of this system also allows for maximum flexibility in its specific configuration.
Wirtschaftsforum: What role does AI currently play for you and your customers?
Onno Bliss: Without artificial intelligence, such massive amounts of data could not be processed at all. That is why all providers who work with these data in the geophysical field have also developed appropriate cloud systems to be able to manage the enormous information from anywhere - we also rely on powerful partners at this point. In our own solutions, we naturally also use AI, especially to pre-filter certain data underwater, so that such large amounts of data do not arise in the first place. This way, we want to enable faster and easier processing.
Wirtschaftsforum: What further company development do you aspire for the coming years?
Onno Bliss: While our core business has had a strong institutional customer base so far, we are increasingly gaining customers from the general economy. Nevertheless, with our Monitoring-Measurement-and-Verification approach, we also want to grow in other segments and recently won our first client from the Carbon-Capture-and-Storage sector. More industrial customers are to follow. To also push our technological development with due emphasis, we are currently looking for investors to expand our R&D team with the appropriate resources. We are building on a stable business model in established markets, aiming to move into the future as agile as a start-up company.