Kenneth Richardson, ABS vice-president of energy development, details these general criteria for the optimized floating production facility of the future:
Float subs factory software#
“This new subsea facility will also be managed by an advanced control system using powerful software and a multitude of seabed sensors to actively help maximize the hydrocarbon extraction rate.” Tomorrow’s floating production facility “Many of the pieces of this puzzle are already being worked, beginning with the Troll subsea separation project that VetcoGray installed in 1999. “In addition, it is also possible that the power to drive all this will be ‘resident subsea’ as well,” he says. Within the next 10 years, predicts Gary Shaw, technology leader, VetcoGray, a GE Oil & Gas business, the complete subsea processing plant is likely to become a reality where fluids and gas are extracted from the reservoir, analyzed, separated by fluid type, treated, and then pumped to processing facilities-or in the case of gas, compressed and then sent to be processed. Nooteboom, vice-president, field development projects for INTEC, contends that the deepwater sector will see more long-distance tiebacks to existing infrastructure or all the way to the beach: “Distances will continue to increase, using technologies such as subsea pumping/compression, subsea processing, flowline heating, efficient subsea power delivery/generation, etc.” Namtvedt, president of FloaTEC, thinks that the optimized subsea solution will involve new technologies such as subsea processing and boosting, ESPs, all-electric systems to enable further step-outs, and compact tree designs.
Olivier Saincry, Doris Engineering subsea systems manager, foresees the optimization of subsea system installations “residing in the use of autonomous equipment, maintenance work without the use of surface support vessels, and a number of topside processes being done subsea, limiting the number of links between the seabed and surface.”Įric H. “Daisy-chained pipeline loop (like Canyon Express) or field hub (like Independence) approaches to field development will be the norm, since most oil companies will have to form consortiums to share in the infrastructure costs.”įinally, oil and gas companies are accepting the notion that subsea metering, boosting, and separation are smart and economical means to address both infrastructure-lean areas of the world and longer offset distances, Skeels contends: “The bigger picture is getting the overall recovery rates of subsea fields up to be on par with conventional platform completions for the same cost.” Smart subsea field architects will add plug-in bases in the field pipelines that can accommodate the later installation of more infrastructure when it’s needed, without disturbing what was initially installed. Subsea production facilities can be added later in a modular plug-and-play scenario to deal with production plateaus or changes in well count. “This modular approach also lends itself to easier installation and a pay-as-you-go schedule.
“Clustered wells leading to manifolds connected by umbilical flying leads and jumper connections allow for smaller modular components that can be set on the seafloor side-by-side and then connected up,” he says. The days when all of the equipment and trees mounted on one-of-a-kind giant templates with integrated and form-fitting piping and connections are fading into the past, claims Brian Skeels, emerging technology manager, FMC Technologies. Other hallmarks of tomorrow’s deepwater production facilities will be increased automation, more modularization, improved size/weight ratios, longer tiebacks, and expanded use of subsea processing. Much of the design changes will entail borrowing the basic concepts in use today and reconfiguring them in new ways.
As the offshore oil and natural gas industry continues its march into deepwater frontiers, the facilities that will be the mainstays of that push, subsea installations and floating production facilities, will take on a distinctively different look.
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