Mr Sharman, who studies offshore centres, says it is inevitable that, as they venture into more complex finance, they will become more vulnerable to scams.
"They have horribly underestimated the likelihood of a spill and therefore horribly underestimated the consequences of something going wrong," said Robert G. Bea, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies offshore drilling.
"There was no money to fix this stuff, and we didn't have a lot of spares, so we temporarily took money out of other" programs to replace the radars, which a coalition of universities and government agencies use to study offshore winds and currents.
The Department of Energy announced plans yesterday to deploy a new research facility to study offshore wind power.
Through studying key offshore wind farm technology, we can make offshore wind farm system optimization designing techniques reach the most advanced levels internationally, train teams with innovation ability, which are engaged in designing and running wind farm to manage wind-power electricity generation and wind farm design.
"The oil industry went off the deep end with a new kind of risk, and they didn't bother to build a response capability before they had a big disaster," said Richard Charter, an advocate with Defenders of Wildlife who studies offshore drilling.
A 3-D model study offshore Oahu Island (Hawaii) demonstrates that these responses are sensitive to the conductivity structure beneath the ocean.
Early exploratory studies offshore along the Atlantic coast of the southeastern U.S. concentrated on finding exploitable fish populations.
Iran is keen on selling gas to India, and has already commissioned BHP, an Australian company, to do a feasibility study for an onshore pipeline and Snamprogetti, of Italy, to study the offshore option.
HVDC technologies, based on line commutated converters (LCC) [4, 5] or voltage source converters (VSC) [6, 7], have been studied for offshore wind farm integration.
