The subsea equipment for the floating production system in the Green Canyon Block 29 development includes a 24-slot template, template trees and satellite trees.. This paper discusses the design requirements for the template and satellite completions and the resulting hardware that was developed to meet these requirements, including design considerations, installation procedures, and an overview of current progress.
Placid Oil Company is developing Block 29 of the Green Canyon area of the Gulf of Mexico with a deepwater floating production system incorporating a large subsea production system. Reservoirs in this field will be produced through wells drilled through a subsea template insta11ed in 1522 ft of water (464 m), as well as sate11ite wells tied back to the template. The overall system configuration is shown in Fig. 1. This paper discusses the design requirements for the template and subsea completion hardware and the resulting hardware that was developed to meet these requirements.
The design requirements for template system were determined and finalized into a design specification from the criteria outlined in Placid Oil Company's scope of work for the development of the Green Canyon Block 29 subsea production project.
In broad terms, the design requirements were finalized into the following template specifications:
The subsea structure would be deployed in water depths to 3500 ft (1067 m) and would accommodate a total of 24 subsea production trees.
The structure should provide the lower termination and anchoring point for the freestanding production/service riser system.
It should provide the structure (porches) and connect ion points (pull- in hubs and connectors) for the flowlines from satellite wells, import pipelines from other templates and the product export pipelines.
The template should accommodate within itself all the piping from the riser to each individua1 well bay and all the pipelines and its associated valving. (Later requirements also added a set of subsea pig launcher facilities and their associated piping and valves that were connected to the import and export lines.)
A system would have to be provided for piling and leveling the template structure.
A method would be required for transporting and installing the system.
Most of the design requirements could be incorporated into almost any type of template structure. To determine the most efficient and cost-effective template structure a great number of analyses and trade-off studies were conducted. The more comprehensive studies looked into the component arrangement and preliminary structure framework. These studies addressed the component arrangements, flowline and pipeline sizes, structure analysis to determine the structure member sizes and the development of the preliminary component interfaces for the riser base, manifold piping and piling requirements. Buoyancy and trim of the structure were also analyzed.
