Abstract
Offshore drilling in the Gulf of Suez (GOS) poses major challenges when subsea structure insulation is required especially when high water depths and rough weather are encountered. A big-bore mud-line well was drilled, in the preparation to drill the second appraisal well from the same surface location, a subsea structure is required to be installed at the mud line level achieving a certain heading using smart vision Camera.
To overcome the safety and operation challenges, a pre-well planning meetings were done to survey all new technologies that can help to achieve optimum performance and cost effective solutions to run and orient subsea structure safely to the desired direction. Hence, a team form multiple discipline was performed to utilize an innovative smart camera technology benefits the power of augmented reality for the first time in Egypt to land and orient the platform template at the desired heading. The smart camera attached to a remotely operated vehicle used to determine the heading and attitude while landing the subsea structure.
Historically, conventional survey sensors are typically attached to subsea structures along with diving operations were used to run and orient substructure during installation process, which have a lot of limitation in addition to multiple safety and operational risks as
Risks associated with vessel and Rig approach due to tight space along with template latch and unlatch operation to grantee mechanism functionality
Rough weather conditions in GOS during summer time which require significant wait on weather time to have the required operational weather window.
Water depth of 55 meter that leads to use a costly saturation diving operations.
To mitigate the above mentioned risks with lower project cost the team decided to utilize the innovative smart camera technology that successfully determined the heading and attitude of the platform template and precisely landed the subsea structure to the desired direction within the desired accuracy. This eliminates the requirement to pre-install a sensor package on the structure, and retrieve it once installation is complete, which reduces the time and costs associated with a dive support vessel.
The paper provides a detailed description of the safety and operational challenges in this application.
