Subsea processes driving oil & gas market

While the onshore development of shale gas in the UK is grabbing all the headlines, it is actually the development of new deepwater fields that is creating the most excitement among suppliers to the oil & gas sector.

According to the Energy Institute, deepwater discoveries accounted for approximately 50% of the proved and probable hydrocarbon reserves discovered in 2010. This was up from less than 10% in 2005.

This growth has necessitated an increase in capital investments for deepwater, growing from $40 billion in 2005 up to $70 billion in 2010. Over the current decade, capital spending is expected to double from $541 billion in the 2000s to $1,245 billion in the 2010s.

With the higher costs associated with developing deepwater fields, subsea development of oil fields is increasingly preferred to traditional surface platforms.

“Moving technology from the platform or the onshore facility and down to the seabed simply means lower investment and operational costs in the long run,” said ABB vice president of strategy and business development Borghild Lunde.

“The smaller oil and gas fields become more profitable and the recovery rate increases. In other words, with technology we are able to increase the number of profitable fields and their life spans.”

Subsea solutions can cost up to 50% less to operate, according to Rockwell Automation. The company is, like most suppliers, re-engineering its products for the subsea market, and says that as well as cutting costs, subsea production can significantly increase yields.

We can now solve challenges in terms of process control over vast distances, in greater depths of water and in increasingly harsh conditions.

ABB vice president of strategy and business development Borghild Lunde

Traditionally, loss of pressure due to the extraction process made some hydrocarbons unrecoverable by normal methods as there is insufficient pressure to push oil and gas to sea level.

Moving production to the seabed reduces the pressure required, and estimates suggest this could lead to up to 20% higher yield from producing fields.

Overcoming the engineering difficulties, not only in implementation of subsea solutions but also in reliability and safety, is challenging but possible due to advances in automation technology.

“What we have done is taken one of our AADvance controllers – already proven in top side oil and gas applications – and ‘marinised’ it to make it fit for subsea environments in terms of robustness, redundancy and reliability,” said Rockwell Automation project manager Malcolm MacKay.

The firm will be showcasing its technology at the Offshore Europe 2013 conference in Aberdeen in September.

Many other suppliers will also be showcasing new subsea technology at the show, including Tracerco with the world’s first subsea CT scanner for flowlines.

The conference will also stage technical seminars on advances in subsea construction and technology.

While subsea technology has been around for more than 30 years, Lunde said it was now truly coming in to its own.

“I have followed the development of subsea technology closely since its beginnings as only ideas in the 1980s to today’s reality which are subsea facilities with an increasing amount of hi-tech equipment under the sea,” said Lunde.

“We can now solve challenges in terms of power supply and process control over vast distances, in greater depths of water and in increasingly harsh conditions.”