Estonia: Ocean Visuals - Joint venture between Estonia and Norway

Innovative solution for oil spill detection

The Green Industry Innovation programme in Estonia financed the Estonian R&D company, LDI Innovation and ICD Industries (now Industries Holding), a Norwegian-based company developing maritime industry products to develop a real-time oil-spill detection software.

At the time, there was no solution that could collect such data on the state of water. Gathering such data was challenging in extreme weather conditions. The companies found each other in 2013 during the launch seminar of Estonia’s Green Industry Innovation Programme under the EEA and Norway Grants

Complementary competencies and a joint venture

It is clear that the know-how of both LDI Innovation and ICD Industries has played a complementary role in the success and quality of the solution. LDI Innovation helped design a laser system for the softwards, and ICD Industries developed a multisensory information platform to store real-time data which can assist in decision making.

The oil spill detection and verification system is particularly suitable for Arctic conditions and has been deployed on the Norwegian coastal cruise ship MS Midnattsol. A fully automated sensor and information system prototype was built and tested between 2014 and 2016. This was done on board Norwegian, Barents, Baltic and Caribbean vessels.

The successful project resulted in the establishment of Ocean Visuals, a joint venture between the partners in 2015. Ocean Visuals has its headquarters in Ålesund, Norway and has a subsidiary in Tallinn. An additional solution, Oil-in-Water Locator (OWL ™) has been added to Ocean Visuals’ product range.

Learn more about Ocean Visuals in the video below:

Read more about the project here.

For more information, see the publication from Enterprise Estonia here.

The Green ICT Programme in Estonia

The project is supported by Norway through the Norway Grants. See more opportunities under the Estonia - Green ICT Programme.