Abstract
Subsea processing is one of the most interesting technologies currently being introduced into the oil and gas industry. Treating the production flow at the seabed opens up opportunities to achieve more effective deployment of oil and gas reservoirs in all regions around the world. Among these are Tordis in the North Sea, BC-10 in Brazil, Perdido in the Gulf of Mexico and Pazflor in Angola. All of these projects include subsea separation and boosting.
For BC-10 and Perdido, gas/liquid Caisson separators with a length of approx. 100 metres are utilized together with Electrical Submersible Pumps (ESPs) to enable and boost production from deep water reservoirs.
The Tordis Increased Oil Recovery project realizes the first commercial full scale subsea separation installation in the world. By separating out water and sand at the sea floor and injecting this waste into a dump reservoir in a closed loop system.
The successful installation and start-up of the Tordis Subsea Separation Boosting and Injection system and the Perdido gas/liquid Caisson separators, subsea processing is now taking its first steps into the future.
The common view is that there will be many applications for subsea processing as the technology matures and gather more widespread acceptance. With the oil industry running out of oil that is easy to produce, means that producing oil and gas from offshore fields in deeper waters and in more remote areas is inevitable.
Considerable efforts are being made in the area of subsea gas compression, which has great potential and could save cost of additional surface infrastructure where compression is needed to continue production of maturing gas and longer step-out fields.
Although the solutions for these projects are different, many of the technological challenges are similar. A brief overview of the technological challenges for these projects will be presented, together with recent developments within Subsea Processing.
