As countries continue to develop their natural resources to drive the economies of the world, the need to find and make productive additional deposits of hydrocarbons continues to grow.

This has really been seen over the last three decades in the large increase in the number offshore oil reservoirs that have become productive around the world.

While oil has been produced offshore since the 1940s, this was done using platforms that sat directly on the seabed.

With the move to deeper waters starting in the 1970s a shift to Floating Product Units (FPUs) allowed for these more challenging deposits to be reached.