MacDonald Hallett Oceans Protection Engineering Group Inc. – Customer Discovery

In January 1993 the oil tanker MV BRAER was transiting north of Scotland in the Shetland Islands. The ship was abandoned, adrift, and being blown towards rocky shores. A line could not be secured to the stricken vessel before it grounded and broke up causing a catastrophic oil spill.

The MacDonald Hallett Oceans Protection Engineering Group Inc. is a high-tech ocean engineering start-up poised to resolve the situation described above. For ships that are ABANDONED, or if they are adrift and are otherwise unable to manually rig a towline, our novel, remotely activated and automatically deployed Emergency Towing System (ETS) will permit a ship to be taken safely in tow, thereby saving life at sea, preventing loss of ship and cargo, and avoiding an environmental disaster with huge liabilities.

Note autonomous shipping is becoming more and more prevalent; such ships are, by definition, abandoned.

With funding support from Innovacorp at the Centre for Oceans Ventures and Entrepreneurship (COVE), and NRC, MHOPEG engaged with Dr. Mae Seto, Faculty of Engineering, Dalhousie University, to advance two significant milestones of the proposed Automatic Emergency Towing System (AETS). The system will be fabricated, integrated and tested by early April 2022.

The system will be further marinized and ruggedized through a Mitacs project with Dalhousie University over the period May – Dec 2022.

With this Mitacs project running concurrently with the above it is intended to address the business development requirements of the MacDonald Hallett Automatic Marine Emergency Towing System to design/establish a business development infrastructure.

Faculty Supervisor:

Ellen Farrell

Student:

Partner:

MacDonald Hallett Oceans Protection Engineering Group Inc.

Discipline:

Business

Sector:

Manufacturing; Transportation and warehousing

University:

Saint Mary's University

Program: