Marine Technology Reporter Blogs - gom

The C-Worker is an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) designed for offshore services in the O&G industry. The multi-role offshore USV is designed to conduct subsea positioning, surveying and environmental monitoring without the need of a ship on station or seabed anchoring. Autonomous Surface Vehicles Ltd (ASV Ltd) is a UK company and part of Global Fusion, a privately owned international marine services group based in Lafayette, Louisiana, USA. The small robust design incorporates an aluminum self-righting hull that makes the vehicle suitable for harsh ocean environments. At only 5.85 meters in length, a beam of 2.2 meters and a height of 4.75 meter with its mast extended, this USV is a much cheaper and compact option for some offshore jobs that today are done by much larger vessels.

Riserless Light Well Intervention (RLWI) enables operators to increase the oil and gas recovery rate from subsea oil wells. It allows rapid well access by using smaller DP vessels instead of larger semisub drilling rigs or drillships. RLWI also enables subsea well intervention without having to use a drilling riser package connected to the subsea stack, which is topped by the blowout preventer system. Riserless intervention is a cost-saving alternative to drilling rigs, reducing mobilization time for life-of-well operations including wireline, logging, light perforating, zone isolation, plug setting and removal, and decommissioning. The technology is based on wireline well maintenance, where the cable is routed via a subsea lubricator system into the subsea well.

Reverse time migration (RTM) is a powerful imaging tool. It has the ability to account for rapid spatial variations in the velocity model and to utilize all wavefront information, producing superior images of the most complex structures. This is why RTM is frequently used to interpret salt structures in regions known to have complex salt geometries like the Gulf of Mexico. With the application of recent advancements such as Vector Offset Output and 3D angle gathers, the imaging capability of RTM is enhanced even further. RTM is a pre-stack two-way wave equation depth migration, recognized as being able to produce superior pre-salt images compared to other migration algorithms such as Kirchhoff, control beam migration (CBM) or one-way wave equation migration.

The Wave Glider is the first unmanned autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) to use wave energy for propulsion. Its ability to stay out at sea gathering data for long periods of time, through all weather conditions, and communicate real-time data from the surface of the ocean, assures it has a wide array of uses both for academia and for the offshore industry. First introduced in 2009, Wave Gliders have since traveled more than 300,000 nautical miles, set a world record for longest distance traveled by an autonomous vehicle, and been deployed on more than 100 customer missions ranging from the Canary Islands and the UK in the Atlantic Ocean to Australia in the Pacific Ocean to the Arctic.

Since the Deepwater Horizon tragedy in 2010 the industry has taken long strides in well control and well blowout containment. British Petroleum, having been directly involved in the accident at the Macondo well, was forced to look into a solution that would permanently seal the gushing deepwater well. However, even before they could come up with a permanent solution, BP needed to cap the well over the damaged BOP (Blow-out Preventer). This eventually took BP a few months to accomplish, yet using a large amount of engineering ingenuity a capping stack was manufactured which got the job done. Since at the time there was no off-the-shelf solution to capture the spilling oil straight from the BOP…

Liquid hydrocarbon fuels can be produced from associated natural gas via a well-known catalytic chemical reaction called Fischer-Tropsch (FT) synthesis. The FT synthesis is a collection of chemical reactions that converts a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen into liquid hydrocarbons. It was first developed by Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch at the "Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Kohleforschung" in Mülhei an der Ruhr (Germany) in the 1920s. During World War II, FT synthesis provided the needed liquid hydrocarbon fuels for the German war effort. Later, facing isolation during the apartheid era, South Africa turned to FT synthesis from coal gasification to supply significant quantities of its hydrocarbon fuel needs.

Where is the Petrobras Deepwater Containment System? Brazil today arguably has the largest deepwater drilling program in the world and most probably the biggest all around drilling effort in the world to boot. In 2011 alone 162 new wells will be drilled in Brazil, an all time high and a 30% increase compared to last year. Of these, 53 wells will be drilled offshore. It´s safe to assume that over 20% of these will be in deepwater pre-salt or deepwater post-salt plays along the Santos, Campos and Espirito Santo Basins. When Petrobras first announced this significant increase in their drilling program scope, a lot was said about expectations for more large pre-salt finds, increase in production, new drilling technologies, logistics problems and solutions and ultimately, profit.

This cost isn´t only in equipment and manpower, it´s in lives, human and animal and destroyed ecosystems which will take at least a decade to recuperate. Safety must always come first. Even with the most reliable equipment and redundancy, there will always be the human factor. Nothing like a full on environmental tragedy to make for a vital attitude change: Safety first, and then all the profit scene. We all know now, that there is no infallible safety measure, well not man proof anyway. Pressure seems to be a wee bit of a problem too. Like the old saying goes: You only knows, when it blows! Well now we know, don´t we? This is the worst case scenario and it could not be correctly simulated.

Among the many challenges facing E&P in the Brazilian deepwater pre-salt plays, is that of anchoring the flowlines, platforms, FPSOs and even buoys to the seabed which can be over 2000 meters deep. Petrobras has developed a simple and efficient method of doing this through the Torpedo Pile.In the case of the deepwater pre-salt plays in Brazil, specially at the Santos Basin, the distance from land to some of the proven plays like Tupi and Iara, which are around 300km from shore and pose complex logistics problems even on surface structures. Challenges, such as how to anchor a deepwater rig or FPSO to the seabed 2,200 meters down must be resolved. It is a long distance for anchors to travel, normally four or more anchors are used and these anchors need to be aligned.

BW Offshore’s technology division APL is set to make its South American debut following a contract win to supply Maersk Contractors with a Submerged Turret Production (STP) system for use in Brazil’s Peregrino field.Maersk Contractors is converting one of its new VLCCs into an FPSO for the project and APL will design, fabricate and deliver an internal turret and mooring system for integration inside the FPSO. This includes the STP buoy/turret, the APL swivel stack and mooring lines. APL will also deliver the STP compartment structures. “We are very pleased to be the selected partner for this project and to have the opportunity to continue providing technology and services to one of our key clients,” says Arild Saudland, project manager APL.

The Society for Underwater Technology Technical Conference in Rio de Janeiro discusses the main challenges to be faced in Deepwater O&G exploration and examines the many possible solutions through technological innovations. Summary of the first presentations during the second day of the conference.The second day of the SUT Technical Conference started off with keynote speaker David Brookes, Chief engineer Subsea and Floating Systems for BP. Mr. Brookes has been with BP since 1979 and has been in various subsea related positions within the company, been an acknowledged specialist is subsea system. His was an inspiring presentation about the perspectives on subsea development…