The offshore oil & gas industry is now looking at new exploration districts (open sea, ultra-deep waters), often in harsh and remote environments. Therefore plenty of data from fields under development e.g. meteo-ocean and water depth, seabed morphology and geo-technics, production and transport conditions, export and storage requirements, etc.. are currently processed, specifically to define the potential of new development concepts. They are the input to gap analyses that often lead to joint industry R&D efforts e.g. on lighter and stronger materials, new pipeline concepts, complex and heavy manifolds with sophisticated control and monitoring systems, subsea processing and boosting etc... The subsea technology is therefore under continuous development, looking towards the oceanic depths with the aim to meet the challenges of near to come field development projects.
In this context the installation of flow-lines, pipeline end termination structures and manifolds in ultra-deep waters is an outstanding issue. There is international consensus that reel-lay and J-lay are the reference pipe lay technologies for ultra-deep water field developments, with S-lay dedicated to large diameter export pipelines from the depths to the shore. Therefore, powerful lay vessels and high capacity equipment are purpose tested and developed to meet the new installation challenges in ultra-deep and harsh environments.
This paper presents an overview of the relation between product transportation needs and pipe-lay technology. The aim is a critical review of technical and economical peculiarities of available installation vessels in the light of development efforts on new equipment for field development, including new concepts for remote control of production and transportation.
