Perdido is located in the Western Gulf of Mexico in 7,817 feet of water. It is being developed with cutting-edge subsea technologies to mitigate the project's key development challenges, which include extreme water depth, rugged seafloor terrain, low-pressure reservoirs, and aggressive hydrate formation tendency.
This paper provides an overview of the Perdido Development subsea and flowline system and its associated flow assurance strategy. This paper also includes reviews of the design, fabrication, and installation of key subsea equipment such as twophase separators, subsea trees, manifolds, top-tensioned production risers, umbilicals, and flowlines. In particular, the two enabling subsea technologies, subsea boosting system and surface Blow-Out Preventer (BOP) for drilling and completing of subsea wells, are discussed.
Unique features of the Perdido subsea system include:
All wells are subsea (wet trees operated by umbilicals) and consist of 22 local Direct Vertical Access (DVA) wells and 12 offset wells.
The subsea DVA wells are drilled, completed, and intervened through a single high-pressure drilling/completion riser and a surface BOP with the host rig.
All production will flow from manifolds into five subsea boosting systems where gas will flow naturally to the topside facility, while liquids will be pumped using electrical submersible pumps (ESPs).
The Perdido Development, jointly developed by Shell, BP, and CVX, includes the Great White, Silvertip, and Tobago fields and is located in the Perdido Basin and Foldbelt, in the Alaminos Canyon Protraction Area. This area is located in the western Gulf of Mexico, 200 miles south of Freeport, only eight miles north of the Mexico maritime border. All three fields are developed with subsea wells tied back to the host, which is a Spar with full offshore processing capabilities and pipelines for export.