EFFICIENT AND FLEXIBLE
POWER SOLUTIONS The Finnish company Wärtsilä is a world leader in power solutions such as engines for ships and power plants for electricity generation. The company is also a major supplier of heavy-duty engines for the production and transport of oil and gas.
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ärtsilä produces power plants for oilfields, engines for crude oil pumping and compression solutions for gas gathering and processing. As a means of power generation, Wärtsilä’s engines provide a higher level of efficiency than traditional alternatives. “Compared to gas turbines, our engine technology is very efficient. A 10 megawatt gas turbine has a 30 per cent electrical efficiency, but a 10MW unit from Wärtsilä gives you an electrical efficiency of about 45 per cent.”
Technology In the oil and gas industry, the consequences of a fault can be ruinously expensive. Wärtsilä’s engines are therefore designed and built for continuous reliability. Production is based
at the company’s factories in Vaasa and Trieste. “We supply the whole world from these factories,” said a company representative. “We developed the first heavy fuel oil engine back in the 1970s. We continue to develop the technology of our engines in order to improve their ability to run on complex fuels.” The acceptance of complex fuels is one of the key advantages of Wärtsilä’s engines, which are designed to use the fuel from the well. The engines can run on different kinds of fuels, both the crude oil from the well and the associated gas. Wärtsilä’s engines function in desert temperatures as well as in cold climates and can be powered by a combination of liquid and gaseous fuels. Because an oil well’s output is variable, Wärtsilä offers engines that can be adjusted to burn gaseous and liquid
fuels in different ratios. The quality of the fuel changes over time but with our technology the engines will cope with these changes.
Utilising recovered gas A particularly significant innovation from Wärtsilä is its GasReformer – an efficient and flexible solution for utilising associated gas or VOCs recovered from oil production. With this solution, gases that were previously considered as waste can now be converted into a valuable source of energy. Together with the Wärtsilä dual-fuel (DF) engines, this is the most efficient and flexible solution for utilising gas or VOCs. The main application area for this is in offshore oil and gas production. Here, the traditional way to get rid of associated gas or
