Transmark Subsea CEO Johan Møller Warmedal joined the company on January 1 this year. Before joining Transmark, he worked for AGR, FMC Technologies and Schlumberger, where he started his career more than 25 years ago as a wireline logging engineer. He gave us his views on subsea industry and Transmark’s future.
What, for you, have been the big technology break-throughs in the past 25 years?
I have had the fortune to live through amazing changes in this industry, mostly driven by the goal to increase oil recovery. Maybe the most material change is steerable drilling. It has enabled horizontal penetration of reservoirs, resulting in both increased drainage and access to areas that would otherwise have remained untouched.
The advancements have also enabled drilling in deeper waters and sparked a tremendous increase in subsea activity. Today, we are able to move almost all aspects of offshore hydrocarbon exploitation to the seabed—without the use of divers! The change from divers to ROVs even at diving depths accelerated the equipment development and made it easier to go below diving depths with confidence.
Tell us about Transmark Subsea
Transmark Subsea AS (TSAS) is a Norwegian family-owned company owned by the Transmark Group. TSAS design, produce and service all cable systems used in subsea equipment such as ROV/ROT’s and cables used for power and control of permanently installed subsea components like wellheads, pumps, manifolds transducer arrays. The customer base is predominantly Norwegian. The company currently employs 23 people. Due to strong growth, TSAS will shortly move to newly acquired facilities at Apeltun, Bergen.
Where has the company’s strength been to date?
With a small group of experienced and highly professional people from the start, Transmark has been able to offer every client individual service and customized solutions. We promise our clients agility, flexibility and swiftness. These are valued qualities in times where sustained high investment level s and supplier demand on the NCS cause long lead times, cumbersome procurement and project delays. We deliberately have long lead items in stock to deliver on our promise.
Where would you like to see Transmark go?
Moving into new and much bigger facilities in Bergen during Q3 this year, we take an important step toward becoming a dependable and independent provider of larger subsea projects, mixed with significantly increased production capacity for our important existing clients and products. The expansion enables us to widen our product portfolio and become a one-stop provider for clients in this region. Longer term, we will widen our geographical footprint to include other important subsea regions, such as GoM, Brasil, West Africa and Asia Pacific.
What do you see as the most important area for technology innovation in the industry in the next 10 years?
Innovation will be mostly focused on further increasing the recovery factors without jeopardizing safety. The industry will acknowledge the need for much better pressure control during drilling and improved post-completion integrity. Continuous seismic monitoring of reservoirs will enable the industry to fine-tune reservoir models and predict the consequences of a given action. The future will see many large arrays of semi-permanent seismic sensors on the seabed.
As field lives keep increasing and equipment gets older, more emphasis will be put on monitoring the functionality and structural integrity. Some equipment will have to surpass its original design life, and highly needed solutions will be developed to mate new technology with existing structures and systems.
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