The Australian Gas Technology Conference & Exhibition (AGT) in Perth has announced awards in Australian gas innovation and recognized and honored gas innovators in the country.

At the AGT conference, Essential Project Solutions’ remote subsea cleaning machine was honored as a low-cost and time efficient alternative to current chain cleaning methods under the commercial category of the gas industry.

Essential’s cleaning machine encapsulates and crawls along the diameter of mooring chains and using ultra high-pressure water removes marine growth to allow close visual inspection of each link to check for possible deterioration.

The awards were launched to recognize and honor gas innovators of Australia who are driving the country’s AUD200bn ($83.7bn) liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry.

Australian Gas Technology event director Bill Hare said the awards are designed to both raise awareness of innovation as a driver of economic and technological change and to maximize the commercialization of ideas by building links between industry, research and learning.

"Australia is at the forefront of innovation in the LNG industry and the finalists honoured last night represent just a sample of the extraordinary range of innovative products and technologies coming onto the market," Hare added.

In the pre-commercial category awards, innovators at the University of Western Australia’s research facilities were recognized, while Professor Liang Cheng and David White both were awarded on behalf of their research teams for the O-Tube Program and the Hemiball Penetrometer, respectively.

The O-tube program has created new techniques for the stability design of seabed infrastructure.

The Hemiball Penetrometer, designed by the Centre of Offshore Foundation at UWA, allows geological engineers to characterize the shallow layer of the seabed to determine the behavior of pipelines when laid on soft, fine-grained seabeds.