Sulzer subsea pumps challenge

London – Sulzer Pumps is working with a number of major oil companies to develop pumping solutions specifically for ultra deepwater and arctic oil and gas production.

Subsea pumping allows recovery from marginal or remote subsea fields and improves yield in either greenfield or brown field applications. However, production typically involves ultra high-pressure environments and conditions that can present significant challenges to pump suppliers and operators.

In response, Sulzer is developing subsea applications for water injection, multiphase and gas-tolerant pumping. These solutions built on proven high-performance technologies are validated in a custom-built 1,500,000 litre capacity test pool in the company’s Leeds facility in the UK.

Sulzer has developed single-phase hydraulics for oil transport or injection purposes as well as gas tolerant hybrid designs for the subsea processing functions. These developments are intended to supplement the company’s multi-phase boosting products.

Multiphase boosting with pressure rises above 100 bar, hybrid pumps for gas laden liquids to pump up to 25% GVF and single phase water injection pumps to be located at the mudline, based on our high pressure topside experience with heads greater than 7000m.

“We are currently in the final round of verification of a 6000rpm 3.2MW multiphase heli-coaxial pump that has been witnessed by the major oil operators and are currently working on further developments of up to 6MW and 15,000psi as well as high viscous testing, a Sulzer spokeswoman reported.