Six Tech Advancements Changing the Fossil Fuels Game

The real advantage of subsea production systems is that they allow you to use one platform—strategically placed—to service many well areas. And as the cost of offshore production rises, this could represent significant savings.

Subsea production could rival traditional offshore production in less than 15-20 years, and we're looking at expected market growth for subsea facilities of around $27 billion in 2011 to an amazing $130 billion in 2020. Analysts expect E&P companies to invest more than $19 billion in subsea production equipment in 2013 alone--and up to $33 billion by 2017.

Subsea processing can handle everything from water removal and re-injection or disposal, to single-phase and multi-phase boosting of well fluids, sand and solid separation and gas/liquid separation and boosting to gas treatment and compression.

Subsea processing allows producers to separate the unwanted elements right on the seafloor, without using complicated and expensive flowlines to bring these elements up to the above-water processing facility to remove them and then send them back down to the seafloor to be re-injected. We're cutting out the middle man here. The middle man in this case is the process known as “subsea boosting”.

What we're talking about, essentially, is saving space and time (which means money) by performing processing activities on the seafloor rather than sending fluids back and forth between the seafloor and the processing facilities above water.

We are particularly interested in a new subsea rotating device that promises to enhance dual-gradient drilling (DGD). This is a system being developed by Chevron, which is hoping to deploy the system is the Gulf of Mexico later this year. What the DGD system will do is render the thousands of feet of mud that is bearing down on the wellbore … well … weightless.

And then we have subsea power grid plans, which have been making progressive leaps since 2010 towards the advancement of electric grids installed on the floor of the sea to run processing systems at the site of underwater wells. It reduces the need for so many platforms on the water surface, and makes the entire process much less complicated. The ultimate goal here is to be able to operate offshore wells remotely from land—saving countless billions.


1234567

View Full Article

WHAT DO YOU THINK?


Generated by readers, the comments included herein do not reflect the views and opinions of Rigzone. All comments are subject to editorial review. Off-topic, inappropriate or insulting comments will be removed.

David Tkachuk  |  July 19, 2013
Onshore pad drilling aka octopus drilling certainly isnt new to the oil & gas industry. Its a very standard onshore approach in northern climes where tundra must be contended with, just to list one example. My own experience commenced in the early 80s in the Canadian Arctic with Esso but Ive also pad drilled in Siberia where "Kyusts" (the Russian term for pads) are as common as mink coats, and have been for about a century. Therefore, I have difficulty understanding all the present day "hoopla" around pad drilling. Its a natural, and rather transparent adaptation from offshore platform drilling to onshore applications as required.
Buster Bryant  |  July 18, 2013
It is not clear (to me) from the article how the Octopus concept differs from the SOP of Alaskas North Slope. This approach to drilling wells has been employed and refined essentially since development began at Prudhoe Bay in the late 1970s.

Most Popular Articles