"We challenge you to show us how the cleaner future is not just a road map; show us how you are addressing it today. But we also challenge you to show us your visions of the future, driven by subsea technology. We challenge you to be bold as we enable the low-carbon future."
Today’s energy industry is one of the most interesting and urgent places to be as an engineer or technology developer. There’s a massive shift happening in how we produce and deliver energy as the world seeks to not just curb but remove CO2 emissions from our atmosphere.
The subsea industry has a central role to play in this transition. We know this industry is an exemplar in technical innovation, stretching the boundaries of what we can safely achieve in the underwater production system to help operators reach reserves in ever harsher environments.
Now it’s also showing that this can also be done with a far lower carbon footprint than using conventional topside solutions. It’s showing that in today’s rapidly decarbonising world, subsea is an enabler for a low-carbon future.
That’s why this year’s Underwater Technology Conference (UTC) theme is
UTC – proud enabler for a low-carbon future
With its decades of experience producing technologies able to operate effortlessly in the most complex subsea environments, in digitalisation, remote operations, electrification and automation, the industry is in the best possible place to enable the green shift, supporting low-to-no emission oil and gas production as well as new growth industries, including carbon capture and storage (CCS), offshore renewable energy in deeper, more remote locations, subsea mining and more.

Benedicte Nordang, head of this year’s programme committee, says, “Oil and gas will play a role in the energy mix for another 20-30 years and with subsea processing technologies we have proven now, today, we can produce it with much lower emissions. We can also apply our engineering knowledge to the green shift, to carbon capture and storage and renewable energies. It’s the same seabed, it’s the same metocean challenges, the long distances, far offshore. Subsea is a key part of the solution.”
Programme committee member Jon Arve Sværen adds, “Yes, we need to change, but we are convinced that subsea has a big role to play in that change. By using subsea processing, we can produce oil and gas with 80% less energy than we are doing today, vastly reducing emissions.”

UTC 2021, co-organised by the Underwater Technology Foundation (UTC) and GCE Ocean Technology, supported by the City of Bergen, is an enabler for delivery on these challenges by sharing the challenges and the solutions.
We challenge you to show us how the cleaner future is not just a road map; show us how you are addressing it today. But we also challenge you to show us your visions of the future, driven by subsea technology. We challenge you to be bold as we enable the low-carbon future.
Written by Elaine Maslin