Abstract
After the successful delivery of two mammoth deep water projects in Sabah, Shell Malaysia turned its attention to develop cost competitive solutions to further develop and generate growth for small/marginal field development. The initial focus was to develop a low cost, minimal facility platform, which meets all the HSSE and operational requirements for a marginal gas field in Sarawak. To do things differently, new but proven technology had to be utilised and for this initial low-cost development wellhead platform, solar panels were employed to generate power for the platform facilities. Electricity generated by this technology is currently limited to 1200 Watts and due to this, the design of the controls of automation systems had to morph along with this limitation. Equipment such as pumps, control and safeguarding systems had to run on 24VDC supply. A low powered integrated control and safeguarding systems, limited to a power consumption of no more than 250 watts, suitable for installation and operation in outdoor hazardous environment, with temperatures reaching 50°C, had to be employed. Due to the power supply limitation, pressurised control rooms to house controls and safeguarding systems now are a thing of the past. And the design of the wellhead control panel was optimised by minimising the number of 24VDC pumps and utilizing pressure boosting regulators to achieve the different required pressures.