Offshore Energy Exhibition & Conference, Amsterdam 24 – 25 November 2026
Smarter Monitoring for the Offshore Energy Industry
Offshore assets are expensive to build and expensive to visit. An export cable, a subsea pipeline or a monopile foundation cannot be inspected without a vessel, a weather window and a crew, which means the interval between one look and the next is measured in months. Fiber optic sensing for offshore energy closes that interval by reading the asset continuously from shore. BiiSensing will be at the Offshore Energy Exhibition & Conference at RAI Amsterdam on 24 and 25 November 2026, held this year under the theme Securing Energy, Sustaining the Future.
Fiber optic sensing for offshore starts with cable already in the water
Offshore energy has a structural advantage for this technology. Export and array cables are installed with optical fiber in the bundle, for communications and control. Subsea pipelines are frequently laid alongside a fiber route. In both cases some strands are unused, and an interrogator in the onshore substation can read one of them.
What that produces is a measurement along the entire run, with the electronics on land. No subsea device to power, no ROV visit to service an instrument, and no survey campaign to take a reading.
What fiber optic sensing for offshore energy measures
Temperature, with DTS. Export cables are rated thermally, and their real capacity depends on burial depth, sediment and seabed conditions that vary along the route and change over time. Eagle DTS resolves 0.03 °C over distances of up to 30 km across up to 4 measurement channels, at 5 m spatial resolution held constant along the whole run. That turns a design assumption into a measured profile, which matters in both directions: a developing hot spot is visible before it becomes a fault, and a route that is running cooler than rated may carry more than the nameplate allows. We covered this in DTS power cable monitoring.
Vibration and acoustics, with DAS. Eagle DAS reads up to 50 km of fiber from a single unit, up to 100 km with optical repeaters, at acquisition rates up to 10 kHz. Offshore, the events that matter are mostly external: anchor drag, trawl gear contact, and vessel activity above a route. Cable exposure through sediment mobility also has an acoustic signature, because an exposed section behaves differently from a buried one. See cable monitoring.
Strain, with DSS. Foundations, risers and cable crossings accumulate mechanical loading. Distributed strain gives it a magnitude and a position, in purpose-built configurations because coupling determines the reading.
Where fiber optic sensing for offshore pays
The operating case for offshore is stronger than onshore, for one reason: the cost of going to look is so much higher.
- Fewer survey campaigns. Continuous coverage lets inspection be triggered by a located anomaly instead of a calendar.
- Failures caught developing. An offshore cable fault is a repair vessel, a splice and lost production. Detecting the thermal or acoustic precursor changes the intervention from emergency to planned.
- Capacity you already paid for. Measured thermal margin can support higher throughput on an existing route without new steel or copper.
- Position, not sector. Locating an event to within about a meter over tens of kilometers is what keeps a repair scope small.
Offshore wind has its own version of fiber optic sensing for offshore
Wind is where the volume of new subsea cable is going, and it brings a monitoring problem that is less about catastrophic failure than about slow, expensive uncertainty.
Cable movement and exposure. Array and export cables are buried to a target depth, and sediment does not stay where it was surveyed. A section that becomes exposed is at risk from fishing gear and abrasion, and today that is usually found by survey. An exposed section is acoustically different from a buried one, which makes this a continuous measurement rather than a periodic one.
Thermal rating against reality. An export cable’s capacity is set by the hottest point along it, which depends on burial depth and seabed thermal properties that vary by kilometer. A measured profile across up to 4 channels replaces a conservative assumption with a number, and on a route that turns out to be running cool that is throughput available without new steel.
Foundations and J-tubes. Fatigue loading at the transition piece is a design-life question, and distributed strain along an instrumented section turns an assumed load spectrum into a recorded one.
What to ask us about fiber optic sensing for offshore
The useful question is not whether distributed sensing works on a subsea route. It is whether it works on your route, which depends on things worth checking before a proposal: whether the installed cable has spare strands and where they terminate, what the fiber type and splice history are, how the cable is coupled along its length, and what the shore end looks like in terms of rack space and power. Those four answers determine most of the project.
Come and go through them with an engineer. If you would rather start before November, Talk to an Engineer and describe the asset.
Event details
- Event: Offshore Energy Exhibition & Conference 2026
- Dates: 24 and 25 November 2026
- Venue: RAI Amsterdam, Europaplein 24, Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Theme: Securing Energy, Sustaining the Future
