Advanced-Subsea Deep in the Pre-salt
With the great demand for deepwater subsea equipment and services, for deployment at the new pre-salt plays and other post-salt deepwater plays from Petrobras and other O&G operators in Brazil, various companies specializing in deepwater equipment and services are setting up or have already set up shop in Brazil.
At this point there are very few totally national companies that have the capacity to offer deepwater E&P support services and basically there are no 100% national companies with the capacity to manufacture deepwater support equipment. That will undoubtedly change along the next decade but for now until the foreseeable future these equipments and services will be provided by foreign companies through their Brazilian subsidiaries. Because of Brazilian local content laws, foreign companies wanting to enter the O&G equipment and services sector are basically forced to open a local subsidiary and hire local manpower in order to participate in Petrobras tenders.
Some deepwater equipment and services companies have been here for a long time, such as FMC, Aker and Subsea 7, to name but a few, many more are recent arrivals, such as ECA Hyatec, which through its Brazilian subsidiary ECA Latin America Ltda. offers a range of AUVs, ROVs and many other equipments to O&G operators and Navies in Brazil and all of Latin America. And recently new arrival is Advanced Subsea do Brasil, an originally French company like ECA, Advanced Subsea do Brasil (ASB) has opened its own local subsidiary and has been actively involved it deepwater survey and construction support in Brazil. ASB is present in the pre-salt through acoustic rig positioning services, metrology, intervention method validation and AUV-ROV trials in open ocean and deep water.
In a partnership between ASB and ECA in deepwater pre-salt areas in the Santos Basin, they are supplying deepwater services based on the Alistar 3000 AUV from ECA. The AUVs are being used either in autonomous mode or in remote mode using a 3km fiber optic umbilical. The scope of the AUV applications are construction support for field installation with pre-lay survey, touch-down point monitoring and as-laid/ as-built survey at the development stage and IMR activities such as pipeline inspection, FPSO riser & mooring inspection at the exploitation stage. Advanced Subsea & ECA just launched a Joint Innovation Project based on Alistar 3000 for sharing AUV experience between major Brazilian market operators.
Advanced Subsea do Brasil currently has various very innovative projects dedicated to Brasilian market, such as: CS-AUV: IMR & Survey Construction Support services based on ALISTAR 3000, Unmanned ultra shallow water survey service development and Pre-salt ROM (regional Ocean Model) JIP for the development of a very high resolution (1/36 of a degree) ocean current numerical model centered on Pre-salt area, allowing 7 days forecast at 50 levels.
The Pre-salt ROM is very important as a way of forecasting the complex deepwater currents that occur along the pre-salt as these currents can be very strong and in some cases hard to predict, endangering the very expensive equipment used to drill and eventually produce the pre-salt oil and also important in case of any spills that may occur at the deepwater seafloor level in order to predict the direction the currents will carry any spilt oil.
Claudio Paschoa
Click here for a look at the company presentation -ADVANCED SUBSEA 2010-4.pdf (3,99 mb)