Efficient and flexible power solutions Wärtsilä

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.

Wärtsilä 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

even recovered VOCs (volatile organic compounds) is either flaring, venting or burning in boilers or gas turbines with high operational costs and low efficiency. The GasReformer has been developed and designed to meet the standards of the oil and gas industry and is the first of its kind in the world.

The GasReformer technology is based on steam reforming (SR), a catalytic process known from the petrochemical industry and refineries, where traditionally hydrogen is produced from various hydrocarbon feeds.

BTC pipeline

Although thousands of articles have been written on the subject of ‘pipeline politics’, the engineering behind the pipelines is seldom appreciated. Pushing oil along the pipeline takes power, and Wärtsilä’s engines for pumping play a vital role in oil transportation. In Ecuador, Wärtsilä’s pumping units are employed in the Heavy Crude Oil Pipeline that carries oil from the oil receiving terminal in Lago Agrio to the port of Esmeraldas.

In Turkey, Wärtsilä delivered the pumps and drivers for the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline. The pipeline, whose total length is 1820 kilometres, transports oil from the Caspian Sea through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to the port of Ceyhan on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. The BTC pipeline has a maximum capacity of one million barrels of oil per day.

The operators of the pipeline, the BTC Consortium, awarded the construction contracts to three different companies, one for each country. In Turkey, the job was given to the Botas Petroleum Pipeline Company. Botas, in turn, employed Wärtsilä to supply the pumps for the project. The Turkish section of the pipeline is the longest and runs for 1076 kilometres. Part of the Turkish section is through mountainous regions and the four pumping stations in Turkey are at altitudes of between 1600 and 2140 metres.

The company made the engines that drive the pumps, and its advisors helped the main contractor. High up in the mountains it is essential that the combustion engines do not lose output. The engines run on natural gas, as there is a natural gas pipeline nearby. The pipeline requires a lot of power and the engines generate nearly 100MW. n