Society for Underwater Technology chief executive officer Dr Bob Allwood told Energy News Premium that while the subsea and drilling sectors had historically been separate activities with different hardware, organisational lessons from the incident had been of particular benefit to the subsea fraternity.

He said another benefit of the incident was that companies were now looking at providing the tools needed to cap deepwater wells that did not exist before.

"This has been a major benefit," Allwood said.

"And this has actually brought the production companies into this. The capping techniques have been largely been researched and developed mostly by the production contractors."

Allwood said there was now more attention being placed on the organisation and management of the companies - an area the subsea production industry had been addressing for a number of years.

"So arguably, they have been in front of the drilling sector in terms of safety," he said.

However, he noted the subsea industry had to remain aware of the risks involved during installation and maintenance.

"We are dealing with medium to sometimes quite heavy lifts offshore, which are always potential risks that are always there with us."

The primary risk to the environment from subsea arose when workovers were being carried out, Allwood said.

"I think the Macondo incident will perhaps be uppermost in companies minds now whenever they are doing work in deepwater."

More generally, Allwood said the subsea industry still viewed a subsea to beach development where there was no infrastructure on the surface as its "holy grail".

"For fields close to the shore, within perhaps 100km, certainly gas, then there is no reason why now, companies should not consider totally subsea facilities, because we do have subsea gas compression, we have processing in the form of separation, it is all there, it requires companies to make that next big step.

"We are not quite at that stage yet. We still produce fluids to the surface, close to the well and then do the primary processing."

He did note that subsea facilities did allow companies to minimise surface infrastructure and that for fields that were located far offshore, like some of the gas fields northwest of Australia, it did not make a lot of financial sense to lay a pipeline to shore.

"I do think that FLNG [floating LNG] systems far offshore make sense - and they are out of sight."

Speaking on future subsea developments, Allwood said the recent problems in the financial world coupled with the drop in oil prices due to the possibility that production in Libya would restart had affected demand.

However, he said demand would eventually drive growth in the greater oil and gas industry and by extension the subsea sector.

"Quite frankly, despite all the work on renewables, which the SUT supports, I don't think there is enough there to fit the space [energy demand] yet," he said.

"We do need oil and gas and we are going to need it for a long time. The population of the world is increasing rapidly and that really is the primary driver for the energy demand."