Subsea technology and developments have been essential to unlocking the Norwegian subsea industry, but they are being challenged by alternative solutions and need to up their game to thrive in the future, a senior Statoil executive told the Underwater Technology Conference in Bergen.
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Image: The challenger - the Oseberg Westflank II unmanned wellhead platform. Image from Statoil. |
Arne Sigve Nylund, EVP development and production, Statoil, said: “Subsea has been essential when it comes to developing the Norwegian Continental Shelf. It started with a modest subsea well in the 1980s and gathered pace through the 1990s. Now subsea developments are 50% of production. 536 subsea wells have been drilled and I think that’s amazing. In the last year alone Statoil has put two ground breaking projects in operation at Asgard and Gullfaks. There has been some small challenges with the latter one and we are working to resolve that with the industry [an umbilical failure meant the systems have had to be removed temporarily].”
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However, rising subsea development costs have meant operators have been looking at alternatives, such as unmanned well heads for the Norwegian Continental Shelf. Indeed, this week, Statoil’s plan for an unmanned wellhead platform for the Oseberg Westflank II project was approved by Norwegian authorities. Statoil has been clear that this has been an alternative to a subsea development.
Nylund said: “There are challenges to subsea. But, front runners needs something breathing down their neck. The current market conditions have made the need to be more cost effective even more urgent.”
He said there were three keys for the industry going forward: simplification, standardization and industrialization, which included lean processes. “The industry is on its way,” he said, giving the Cap-X template concept as an example. It has been developed to reduce the size and cost of drilling templates and was put forward by Statoil as part of its application for licenses in the latest offshore round in Norway. “It will increase efficiency and reduce cost for horizontal drilling and in shallow reservoirs,” he says. It is a quarter the size of current subsea templates, which means more use of light well intervention type vessels instead of rigs or other heavier vessels, reducing costs. Other examples include simplification of the Johan Castberg subsea development concept, “allowing us to see an outline for a profitable development.” Statoil, working with Alcatel-Lucent, has developed a concept for Johan Castberg which uses a single, daisy chain deployed combined DC fiber optic cable, for power and communications for subsea wells, with a separate simplified umbilicals for hydraulics and chemicals, reducing the cost of the umbilicals and removing the need for a host of connectors and jumpers.
Aker Solutions CEO Louis Araujo also pointed to the need for simplification. While the Asgard subsea gas compression project was a huge achievement, it’s also large and complex, or, as Araujo said: “Asgard is like a Swiss watch. Now we need to reduce the price of the Swiss watch. Together with Man we are developing the next generation; slimmer and most cost efficient and to be used in even the smallest fields. We can reduce the size and weight by 50% without reducing the core efficiency."
Aker Solutions has had a 30% cost reduction target put in place before 2014, when oil prices started to slide, said Louis Araujo, CEO of Aker Solutions. “I knew we needed to reduce costs,” he said. “The target is 30% across all the business and in a few [business units] we can achieve more than that, simplifying work methods, the set up and foot print.
All electric subsea solutions were also a common theme in the event’s technical sessions. Going all-electric would add 10-15% savings for subsea fields, said Scott Rowe, group president at Cameron, owned by Schlumberger. The firm is focusing on how to make one well step outs more viable, using a single standard pump to drive perhaps two wells, driving cost down to half what they were previously.
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