The subsea industry has dramatically flourished over the past two decades and is expected to continue its impressive growth in the next 20+ years, especially in deepwater areas. One of the consequences of this undeniable success is that, in the future, operators will have to manage an increasingly greater number of ageing Subsea Production Systems (SPS's) across the world. This is due to the extended field life for offshore developments made possible by the enhanced reliability of subsea hardware and controls, and to the understandable desire of the operators to continue producing from subsea wells beyond the original design life of the SPS components.
This paper presents some of the technical challenges encountered by the Authors while carrying out offshore brownfield work for different operators, discusses the most valuable lessons learned that can be incorporated in the design of future and long-lived SPS's, and investigates the existing opportunities provided by the continuous evolution of subsea technologies to better develop offshore oil and gas fields.
In the light of their working experience, the Authors believe that a truly integrated, multidiscipline approach to offshore field development is a key factor for both greenfield and brownfield projects and that new SPS's should be designed, at system level, for service lives significantly longer than the ones currently specified (i.e. the design life of individual SPS components).
An innovative way of designing SPS's will, in turn, require changes in the way offshore projects are sanctioned and funded and also in the way costs have to be allocated between the current project and possible, future brownfield work.
