At depths greater than about 300m inspection and maintenance can only be done by remotely controlled units. Consequently for permanent deployed structures in deep water both materials selection
and corrosion protection measures should be designed to provide long term maintenance free operation. Cathodic protection (CP) is required for the external protection of structures, subsea installations ,risers and subsea pipelines. Today there is a lack of data on the performance of CP systems in deep water. Present CP guidelines have not incorporated design parameters dedicated to deep water due to the lack of sufficient data. The paper reviews some of the available knowledge with respect to CP current demand and sacrificial anode performance relevant to data for deep water. In the present paper the term deep water will imply water at depths greater than 300 m.