InnovOil Issue 58, November 2017

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Bringing you the latest innovations in exploration, production and refining Issue 58

POWER DRILLING Battery storage takes aim at oil and gas Page 8

RISING STARS Wood plc on marine riser analysis Page 24

MIDDLE EAST EVOLUTION GMS’ cantilever workover unit Page 16

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Inside Media Director Ryan Stevenson ryans@newsbase.com

Cool as ice

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Plug-in drilling

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Ultrasonic UAV

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Tech Radar

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Parker Hannifin on energy storage

Media Sales

Texo Drone’s latest creation

Charles Villiers charlesv@newsbase.com Kevin John kevinj@newsbase.com

ME INNOVATION

Editor Andrew Dykes andrewd@newsbase.com

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Come together

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Case in point

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Subsea vision

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Catalysing change

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GMS’ latest jack-up barge

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ction ations in exploration, produ Bringing you the latest innov

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NTNU’s cracking innovation

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A note from the Editor

DeepRiser 24 Wood plc on riser analysis

and refining November 2017

Issue 58

Self-sealing 27

LING POWER DRIL takes Battery storage aim at oil and gas

A new method of bitumen transport

Page 8

S RISING STAR marine Wood plc on riser analysis Page 24

E-boat afloat

28

Wins and zeroes

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Yara’s battery vessel tested

The North Sea goes digital

ST EVOLUTION MIDDLE EA er workover unit GMS’ cantilev Page 16

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News in brief

32-37

Contacts page

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23 November 2017 The Waldorf Hitlon, London

The Future of North Sea Oil & Gas Efficiency, exploration and innovation – keys to the success of the UKCS

The Future of North Sea Oil & Gas gathers senior level executives to discuss the overarching issues which face operators working in the continually maturing UKCS. The event looks at strategy and innovation taking place at the top level to improve productivity and profitability.

The 2017 edition of the conference will play host to our strongest ever line up of speakers during a period of renewed optimism. With the oil price having stabilised after a period of intense decline, E&P companies are growing more and more confident that there is still significant value remaining.

Here are just some of the event’s expert speakers:

Tony Durrant Chief Executive Officer Premier Oil

Hedda Felin Senior Vice President, UK & Ireland, Offshore Statoil

Dr Robert Trice Chief Executive Officer Hurricane Energy

UK Managing Director & Senior, Vice President, Europe

Morten Kelstrup UK Managing Director Maersk Oil

Algy Cluff Executive Chairman and Chief,Executive Officer Cluff Natural Resources

Graham Stewart Chief Executive Officer Faroe Petroleum

John Martin Chied Executive Officer Hansa Hydrocarbons

Ray Riddoch

Nexen

Please visit www.marketforce.eu.com/northsea1 to find out more about this exciting event, and use discount code EUROIL17 for a 10% discount!

November 2017

InnovOil

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A note from the Editor WE are all accustomed to hybrid cars. But what about hybrid rigs?

The transportation industry is embracing electric and hybrid technologies as a means to reduce emissions and create more efficient vehicles. Shipping is already hot on its heels. Although LNG is likely to be the more dominant source of fuel, there are already projects under way to hybridise platform supply vessels – using battery systems to smooth engine loads and even power station-keeping and DPS – or in some cases, more pioneering work into fully autonomous and fully electric ships. Carrying the flag for these future vessels is the Kongsberg-backed Yara Birkeland, at which we look in more detail inside.

Meanwhile, those same principles are now informing how the industry might design the next generation of rigs, drillships and semi-submersibles. Viewing an offshore asset as an islanded grid illustrates the potential for applying new methods of smart management and energy storage. As the cost of battery storage falls, more applications for the technology will emerge, again helping to reduce fuel consumption, lower emissions and increase efficiency.

This month we speak with Parker Hannifin’s David Blood about the potential for these techniques in the offshore industry.

Elsewhere, rig operators are innovating to do more with less. UAE-headquartered GMS has recently gained ABS certification for a unique cantilever system installed on its latest

self-propelled jack-up barge. The movable cantilevermounted workover unit allows the vessel to carry out well intervention jobs, and many more tasks usually reserved for larger drilling rigs. The result is a more cost-effective vessel that is cheaper and faster to deploy. GMS CEO Duncan Anderson explains more about the system inside.

In addition to GMS, we also look at some of the other leading lights of innovation in the region, ahead of the ADIPEC conference held in Abu Dhabi from November 13-16. As the region pivots to direct increasing investment towards downstream operations, this year the strategic conference programme reflects that shift. It will include several ministerial sessions and four global business leader sessions, offering panel discussions and interviews with some of the senior government and industry decision makers who are shaping the future of oil and gas.

Elsewhere, researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science & Technology have been experimenting with a new method of sending high-resolution video underwater, and we catch up with Glasspoint’s solarpowered enhanced oil recovery (EOR) project in Oman.

All this in addition to consultancy Wood’s thoughts on the advancements in marine riser analysis, a cracking ice-beating innovation from Norway, ultrasonic thickness measurements by drone and much more.

We are pleased to present the November issue of InnovOil.

Andrew Dykes Editor

NEWSBASE

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InnovOil

November 2017

NTNU cracks the problem New research from NTNU uses macro-crack initiator (MACI) surfaces to prevent

I

N any cold environment, ice formation can be a problem. Whether it happens on pipelines, decks or from sea spray, its presence can very quickly become a serious inhibitor to safe and efficient operation.

Indeed, in 2014 DNV GL opened a dedicated joint industry project (JIP) to develop better sea spray modelling. At the time the agency’s Arctic technology programme director Per Olav Moslet remarked: “Sea spray icing poses a threat on multiple levels, from blocking the operation of essential components to jeopardising stability and integrity and thus leading to an increased risk of capsizing.”

Techniques for de-icing tend to include applying solvents – e.g. applying a de-icing solution to aircraft wings – or heating the infrastructure itself. Other efforts to control ice build-up, especially on structures such as wind turbines, transmission lines or indeed rigs, have focused on using “superhydrophobic” materials to repel water.

These substances can be sprayed on to surfaces, or objects can be dipped into the substance. However, they often contain fluorinated chemicals and are rarely guaranteed to prevent ice formation for long periods.

Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have

Patterned sub-structures used in the design of the anti-icing coating engineered a new material which allows ice to form on a surface, but then causes it to crack off. Their recent work on the development of “super-low ice adhesion surfaces” – nattily dubbed SLICE – has just been published in Royal Society of Chemistry journal Soft Matter.

This approach – to allow ice to form but prevent it sticking – is somewhat novel within the field. “We think we NEWSBASE

have found a very interesting method to reduce ice adhesion which is unique, and a breakthrough in the anti-icing community,” commented Department of Structural Engineering professor and SLICE team lead Zhiliang Zhang.

Super-MACI hydrophobic The key to achieving such a surface is an indepth understanding of fracture mechanics.

November 2017

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of ice formation

Main image: Quay port Nynashamn, Sweden Below: Anti-icing coating on a piece of flexible plastic

ice from sticking

In their abstract, the authors write: “The key to lower ice adhesion is to maximise crack-driving forces at the ice–substrate interface.” In practice, that means creating a surface chemistry that will cause cracks by weakening the atomic bonds between the ice and surface – substances referred to as nanocrack initiators (NACI).

Another approach is to cover a surface with micro-crack initiators (MICI), bumps whose roughness enables micro-cracking at the contact between the surface and the ice, also reducing the ability of ice to stick to the surface. Neither method is perfect – but research into these existing structures

by Zhang and his team suggested that a combination would prove highly effective.

This new mechanism would help form large macro-cracks at the meeting between the surface and the ice – a material they dubbed MACI, or macro-crack initiator. As these cracks get larger, ice is less and less likely to stay on the surface.

To test that process, the SLICE team created subsurface layers that had microholes or pillars. They then deposited a thin film of a substance called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), which covered the holey, bumpy substructure layers.

Different MACI structures were tested, as well as designs using multiple layers with

inner holes. In practice, they reported that ice adhesion on MACI surfaces was at least 50% weaker than on pure PDMS surfaces without MACI, and produced “some of the lowest values for ice adhesion ever measured.”

“The ice adhesion strength for common outdoor steel or aluminium surfaces is around 600-1000 kPa,” Zhang said. “By introducing the novel MACI concept to the surface design, we reached the super-low ice adhesion value of 5.7 kPa.” Zhang said the group must now develop the idea, but they believed the breakthrough with MACI might be the best solution for preventing ice build-up without incurring unwanted environmental effects. This study was backed by Statoil and the Research Council of Norway, and the team is now working to establish a dedicated NTNU Anti-icing Lab to launch further studies into ice nucleation, and the properties of ice-repelling surfaces.

“Traditional active de-icing techniques… can have major detrimental effects on structures and the environment. But passive super-low ice adhesion surfaces avoid all those detrimental effects. This is very interesting not NEWSBASE

only for the scientific community, and for Arctic applications, but for solar panels, for shipping and transmission lines. There are a lot of applications related to everyday life,” he added. n Contact: Prof. Zhiliang Zhang, NTNU Web: www.ntnu. edu/nml/slice

InnovOil

The future of drilling lies in big batteries page 8

November 2017

Parker Hannifin’s David Blood discusses how battery storage will shape the future of more efficient vessels and rigs. Andrew Dykes reports

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ATTERY storage is beginning to transform the ways in which we think about energy supply. Whether in electric vehicles, marine vessels or power grids, the operational and cost benefits offered by these systems mean they are no longer the domain of Silicon Valley firms with cash to burn, but viable solutions to long-fought problems. For that reason, the oil and gas industry should wake up to their potential.

Such has been the philosophy of one oil and gas equipment supplier for a few years now. Although perhaps better known for hydraulics, pneumatics, filtration, process

control and other services, Parker Hannifin has also been one of the firms pioneering the use of grid-facing inverters and battery storage in new and interesting applications.

Energy Grid-Tie market manager for EMEA David Blood explained more about the company’s entry into the market. Having produced large power electronics controllers for both DC and AC motors for various sectors for years, the company moved into inverters – components which convert DC into AC suitable for use on the grid. Some renewable generation applications required the permanent flow of regenerated energy from the electric motor or generator back

Eidesvik’s hybrid OSV – Viking Princess NEWSBASE

into the power grid – something a standard inverter is unable to do. “We got involved with a project of trying to create an inverter that was grid-facing. The idea was that we got two of these – one facing the grid and one that was controlling the generator – and you could then continuously take the power produced by the generator and put it into the power grid,” Blood explained.

Successful deployment of these inverters led the group to undertake similar projects with large battery applications, allowing bidirectional energy flow in and out of the battery. From this point, the company’s remit expanded into designing and manufacturing battery container systems complete with cooling and fire suppression systems. These containerised solutions also allowed the designers to incorporate the inverters – and in later iterations, control systems and PLCs as well – meaning an entire storage system and energy management system (EMS) can be shipped to site in one package.

Initial projects have been largely confined to the power industry, particularly in frequency management applications, but include supplying more than half the capacity of a pioneering 100-MW li-battery storage system in the US.

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Parker’s grid-tie inverter container

Lightening the load Beyond a few projects in hybridising vessels and expanding subsea electrification, large-scale batteries have not gained much traction in the industry thus far – even despite the similarities between a large platform/drillship and an islanded grid.

Indeed, the drivers for deploying these technologies in oil and gas are similar to those on land, particularly in situations with high power costs, those which require added redundancy, or which have variable “peaky” loads.

Drilling platforms and rigs require considerable power generating capacity to drive operations. The nature of drilling means users can ill afford to have insufficient capacity at their disposal, so requirements for redundancy and peak load typically result in capacity that is usually oversized for the job and spread over multiple generating units. While necessary for operations, running generators in this way – at variable loads and speeds according to demand – is not ideal in terms of fuel and maintenance costs, and has knock-on effects on the quality and supply (voltage and frequency) in the system.

This is primarily because generators are best used at a specific load and speed – the so-called “sweet spot” – for maximum efficiency. The closer these units are run to

those optimum levels, the better their fuel economy, emissions and power regulation. It is here that Blood sees a perfect opportunity for batteries.

“If you put an energy storage device in there, that would allow you to intelligently switch some of the generators off and cycle around them to equalise running hours,” he explained. “You still have all the redundancy, but you’re just running the system in a more efficient way.”

Blood uses the example of four generators driving a number of variable loads on a rig, including top drive, mud pumps, etc. Rather than receiving a sub-optimal supply from four units, a battery system would allow the operator to turn off one unit altogether, supplementing it with a containerised battery and control system. This can help optimise the load on the remaining three units, while additional power is dispatched from the battery to help the units cope with variable or indeed peak loads.

“These big swings in power production all cause the frequency and voltage of the generators to move, which can have a detrimental effect on other equipment on the system. With a storage system you can ensure much better power quality, keeping frequency and voltage where they should be and at the same time helping to run the generators much more efficiently,” Blood added.

Battery storage also allows the recapture of energy that would otherwise be lost. He continued: “There are times when you’ve got NEWSBASE

net regeneration in the system and there’s nowhere for that energy to go because you’re an islanded system. I believe the way they solve that problem today is just to burn the electricity in resistors and choppers – whereas what you could be doing is putting that in a storage device to consume later on.”

Coupled with more optimal use of fuel in the generators, a system with this flexibility could have significant implications in terms of operator spending – both in reduced capex on generators (reduced size) and reduced opex through more efficient fuel use and maintenance.

It is helpful to put those gains into context. One scenario where storage could be of use is in lowering and raising drilling pipe sections. During lowering, regenerated energy is released on to the drill rig’s electrical grid – and that energy will increase with each new section of pipe added and lowered. Much of this regenerated energy can be consumed by other loads on the electrical grid such as positioning thrusters, but any excess can be stored for consumption later when needed.

In the reverse process, where pipe is raised, the opportunity for storage comes from capturing the energy from lowering an empty hook before raising a pipe section.

Analysis of this process by Parker engineers indicates that over 10% energy could be saved over the raising process with a consequent reduction in fuel costs.

My other rig is a hybrid Although it remains early days, Blood says that there is already appetite within the sector for these technologies – especially

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InnovOil

November 2017

20-MW Parker Hannifin storage system at the ES Gener Cochrane project in Mejillones, Chile within the drilling business. At a recent conference in Houston, drilling contractors were already enquiring as to the potential for several energy storage technologies, including batteries, flywheels and even supercapacitors.

The latter in particular could offer a neat solution to the problem of storing much smaller amounts of energy over short bursts, but may not offer the same flexibility as batteries. “When production cycle turns net regenerative can you store that energy in a supercapacitor with a grid inverter,” added Blood. “They can’t store as much energy, but they can store it and release it very quickly.”

There are also space limitations – supercapacitors are physically quite big for the energy stored, Blood explained, meaning they may not be ideal on the limited deck space of a rig or drillship. “There are all sorts of trade-offs, but it was interesting to hear that some companies are genuinely looking at this,” he continued.

Any use of energy storage in oil and gas will also raise the issue of safety. Given some of the chequered history of li-ion packs in smartphones and other devices, there are necessarily some challenges in adopting the technology in explosive and/or marine environments. However, in Blood’s experience, equipment manufacturers are already rising to the challenge: “What you see now from big battery vendors is that they are making specialist variants. You are starting to see a whole class of li-ion batteries now that are being engineered to put on vessels. These are all pretty much li-ion chemistries perhaps with different module constructions – for example in ruggedised housing, or water-cooled pouches.”

With new application-specific constructions, the hurdles to deploying these systems are rapidly diminishing. Each project of course requires its own analysis of the equipment used and its peak load, but Blood is confident that few systems should NEWSBASE

present issues to a well-managed EMS: “Essentially what you’d be doing is adding the storage on as a new piece of equipment.”

So is the technology ready to go? “For an electrical grid-facing inverter, the answer is a categorical yes, because we do it now,” he affirmed. “Never mind the drilling cycle – there’s a whole movement out there in which people are going to hybridise thrusters and drive-trains on ships. There will be generators driving the ship and coupled to battery banks through grid inverters – that’s going to be the ship of the future.”

Given the potential upsides, efficiency gains and emissions savings from battery technologies, they are already everywhere, from our vehicles to our homes to our power grid. The question now is not if they can make the jump to rigs, but when? n Contact: Dr David Blood

Tel: +44 (0)7713 501 928 Email: dblood@parker.com Web: www.parker.com

November 2017

InnovOil

Texo Drone creation goes ultrasonic

page 11

A UK-based drone inspection firm has created the world’s first UAV with integrated ultrasonic testing capabilities

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F the past five years or so have proved that drones are technically capable of carrying out detailed survey and inspection tasks, the next five will surely be an exploration of whether there is anything they are not capable of.

Although a relative newcomer to the scene, Texo Drone Survey and Inspection (DSI) has used its later entry to develop some of the sector’s most innovative kit. In addition to using established UAV platforms, the company has developed and engineered a suite of proprietary unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and payloads to meet some of the more complex problems faced by the energy industry. The result, it says, is the most advanced multi-rotor and fixed-wing fleet available.

This versatile fleet means inspection teams can take on a range of surveys, from asset information modelling (AIM) to optical gas imaging, internal simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) and supply drops – even winching and heavy-lifting applications with some of the larger units.

Given some of more specific requirements of oil and gas operators, Texo also established a dedicated services division – Texo Drone Survey & Inspection (UKCS) – which has achieved a string of world-first inspections in recent months.

Witness the thickness Most recently, in late September the company announced the deployment of the world’s first UAV with integrated ultrasonic testing (UT) capabilities. For the first time, this enables inspection engineers to undertake a range of thickness measurements, on both flat and curved surfaces, using a remotely operated UAV. With the ability to indicate, via a unique spot identification system, all UT missions are

precise in acquisition and instantaneous in capture and delivery.

Inspection data are combined with a precise photogrammetric visual overlay of the completed survey, pinpointing exact measurement locations on the structure/ surface to an accuracy of under 10mm – therefore providing clients with verified inspection data.

So far, the UT payload has been deployed across a number of different sectors and asset types, including both offshore and onshore wind turbines, telecoms and maritime infrastructure.

Demand for this capability actually came from outside the organisation, the company explained to InnovOil by email. “Like all our industry leading solutions, this has been client led. We have listened to the needs of our clients and gone out and developed this world first – again with the overarching safety objective at the core of development (i.e. negating the need to deploy personnel on ropes),” a spokesperson said.

Texo DSI chief operations officer John Wood noted: “This is a major development in the field of inspection engineering. Client feedback has been indicating that this is an area of huge demand and we have worked tirelessly to bring this to the market.”

John added: “We offer an enhanced UT thickness measurement service to our clients, combined with increased safety to NEWSBASE

personnel and efficiency of data delivery. Like all our class-leading payloads, they are safer than traditional rope access and scaffolding methods and data acquisition can be twenty times faster than by traditional methods – representing significant efficiencies for clients.”

Presented with these additional capabilities, operators seem to have been quick to realise the potential. “The response we have had from clients and the industry has been staggering. We are absolutely delighted that key operators in the energy sector recognise that Texo Drone UKCS has changed the face of technical survey and inspection forever – providing a highly accurate survey and inspection methodology,” the company explained. “The sector has seen the use of drones over the last few years (principally for visual inspection) and they are astounded with the sheer technical advancement and capability of our fleet.”

As for what comes next, the forecast is equally bullish: “There are at least another three world-first applications that are soon to be announced from Texo DSI – watch this space!” n Contact: John Wood

Tel: +44 (0) 1224 531 321 Email: john.wood@texodroneservices.co.uk Web: www.texodroneservices.co.uk

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On the radar

What caught our attention outside the world of oil and gas this month

No more tiny flaws One of the biggest concerns in process control is to ensure that critical components are free of particles or impurities that could affect their operation.

One instance of this is in producing oil pans for vehicle engines. If the process lubricant contains impurities that stick to the areas where the sealant will be applied, the seal will not be tight and the oil pan is likely to leak at this vulnerable point. However, it has not been technically possible to examine every single component for contaminants.

A new inline fluorescence scanner developed the Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques IPM in Freiburg hopes to alter that.

“This scanner not only enables us to perform inline measurements on every single metallic component – during the production process and without requiring additional time – but also enables us to pinpoint the exact location of the dirt particles,” said Andreas Hofmann, business development manager at Fraunhofer IPM. “The outstanding spatial resolution of this system enables us to identify even the slightest deposits or films of less than ten milligrams per square metre.”

The system uses a point-source UV laser to scan a specific area of the component. If traces of grease, remains of organic cleaning fluids or fibres are detected on the surface, they reflect light in the visible fluorescence spectrum as a response to the laser’s UV light.

A detector captures these light frequencies and signals possible contamination.

The scanner is even capable of detecting metallic chips that adhered to the test object in previous machining steps, even though they are not fluorescent.

The scanner is not restricted to applications using metallic components – although the Fraunhofer team says that further studies will be needed to adapt it to other materials. n

November 2017

Playing the palladium Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have created an ultra-fast hydrogen sensor that can detect the gas at levels of under 1% in under seven seconds. The sensor also can detect levels of hydrogen gas down to hundreds of parts per million within one minute at room temperature.

The sensor is based on a palladium (Pd) nanowire array coated with a metalorganic framework (MOF). Palladium has traditionally been used in detectors, but the use of an MOF coating – a simple process of dipping the wires in a methanol, zinc nitrate hexahydrate and 2-methylimidazole solution – enables the device to filter hydrogen particles better.

The porous material features micro-pores of 0.34 nm and 1.16 nm, meaning hydrogen gas with a kinetic diameter of 0.289 nm can easily penetrate inside the membrane, while large molecules are effectively screened.

This means the detector has a recovery and response speed twenty times faster than pure palladium nanowires at room temperature.

Hydrogen’s lower explosion limit is 4% by volume in air, meaning any sensor must pick up the gas quickly. According to the US Department of Energy (DoE), hydrogen sensors should be able to pick up 1% volume within 60 seconds to ensure an effective response time.

Co-author Professor Il-Doo Kim of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST added that other gases could be detected via the use of a variety of MOF layers.

Written by first author and PhD candidate Won-Tae Koo, Professor Kim and Professor R Penner of University of California-Irvine, the study has been published in the online edition of ACS Nano. n

Earth-shaking news A group of researchers from the UK and the US have used machine learning techniques to predict earthquakes successfully in a lab environment.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Boston University identified a previously hidden sound signal which precedes earthquakes and

used it to train a machine-learning algorithm to predict future quakes.

The characteristics of this hidden sound pattern can be used to give a precise estimate (within a few percent) of the force applied to the fault and to estimate the time remaining before failure (with increasing precision as the failure approaches).

The team now thinks that this

sound pattern is a direct measure of the elastic energy that is in the system at a given time.

“This is the first time that machine learning has been used to analyse acoustic data to predict when an earthquake will occur, long before it does, so that plenty of warning time can be given – it’s incredible what machine learning can do,” said co-author

NEWSBASE

Professor Sir Colin Humphreys of Cambridge’s Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy, whose main area of research is energy-efficient and cost-effective LEDs. Their results, which could also be applied to avalanches, landslides and more, are reported in the journal Geophysical Review Letters. n

November 2017

InnovOil

Flipping a switch

Wonder material graphene is a promising candidate for electronic devices, thanks to its excellent conductivity. However, there is a catch: electrons move through the material so well that they cannot be stopped. This precludes graphene’s use as a transistor, which must be capable of switching on and off.

Yet a new study from staff at Rutgers University-New Brunswick suggests a method of “taming” these excitable electrons, potentially enabling the material’s use as an ultra-fast transporter of electrons with a low loss of energy.

Their study, published online in Nature Nanotechnology, suggests that it may become possible to create a graphene nano-scale transistor. The team managed to control electrons by sending voltage through a high-tech microscope with an extremely sharp tip – the size of one atom. They created what resembles an optical system by putting a voltage across a scanning tunnelling microscope, which offers 3-D

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Caption in here for the graphine pics

views of surfaces at the atomic scale.

The microscope’s sharp tip creates a force field that traps electrons in graphene or modifies their trajectories, similar to the effect a lens has on light rays. Electrons can easily be trapped and released, providing an efficient on-off switching mechanism, according to Board of Governors Professor in Rutgers’ Department of Physics and NEWSBASE

Astronomy in the School of Arts and Sciences Eva Y Andrei, also the study’s senior author.

“You can trap electrons without making holes in the graphene,” she said. “If you change the voltage, you can release the electrons. So you can catch them and let them go at will… In the past, we couldn’t do it. This is the reason people thought that one could not make devices like transistors that require switching with graphene, because their electrons run wild.”

According to the Andrei, the next step would be to scale up by putting extremely thin wires, called nanowires, on top of graphene and controlling the electrons with voltages.

The study’s co-lead authors are Yuhang Jiang and Jinhai Mao, Rutgers postdoctoral fellows, and a graduate student at Universiteit Antwerpen in Belgium. The other Rutgers co-author is Guohong Li, a research associate. n

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ME INNOVATION November 2017

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT Pages 15-22

DOWNSTREAM DESTINATION ADIPEC 2017 to focus on new MENA model Page 18

SEA VIEW

KAUST develops underwater optical system Page 20

HEART OF GLASS PDO’s EOR action plan Page 22

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InnovOil

The theory of

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November 2017

MIDDLE EAST INNOVATION

Gulf Marine Services’ latest SESV benefits from a unique cantilever unit and workover unit

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AST year’s ADIPEC saw the unveiling of Gulf Marine Services’ (GMS) latest, and arguably its most innovative, vessel.

This year, GMS Evolution will not be making an appearance at the conference, but having recently gained ABS certification, it is instead preparing for its first commercial work.

The E-Class vessel was built in Mussafah by Abu Dhabi-based GMS. The company builds and operates a fleet of 14 self-elevating support vessels (SESVs) – also known as jack-up barges – of which the Evolution is the final vessel of seven MSC Gusto DP 2 designs commissioned over the last few years. The Evolution will join other similar vessels in the fleet, including the Enterprise, Endurance and Endeavour, all launched by GMS since 2010.

With an overall length of 81m, a variable load of 1,700-3,200 tonnes and berths for up to 150 personnel, the Evolution is not too dissimilar from other jack-ups on the market.

Built for work in water depths of up to 80m, it may not compete for the work undertaken at deeper deployments by larger vessels, but nevertheless boasts some impressive and world-first engineering.

At the rear of the vessel is a removable cantilever skid system and well workover unit (WOU). This system can move the drill floor up to 15m aft of the ship (and up to 8m transverse), allowing it to be manoeuvred over a platform or subsea well.

Speaking with InnovOil by phone, GMS CEO Duncan Anderson explained the strategy behind the innovation: “We were subcontracting much of the deck services but we decided that we could do it ourselves and add value to the deck of our barges, so we developed the cantilever system. It’s not particularly innovative in its idea – it is essentially what a drilling rig has, allowing you to skid over the wellhead. We have been conducting services with our lighter units using wireline coiled tubing, etc.”

Anderson noted that the decision was mainly led by the over-specification and cost of larger drilling rigs: “We commissioned a survey and found out that about 30% of what a drilling rig does in shallow water is well intervention. Really, though, for intervention, a drilling rig is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.” By adding those extra capabilities to a lighter, faster barge, the result is a much more efficient and cost-effective system.

Cracking the market Developed in partnership with Dwellop, a Norway-based designer of topside handling systems for well intervention, the Evolution’s NEWSBASE

cantilever system allows GMS to offer the kind of well workover and intervention work that was previously only performed by jack-up drilling rigs. The result is the drilling and intervention capabilities of a jack-up with the speed and flexibility of a barge.

According to Dwellop, the WOU system is hydraulically powered with rack & pinion hoisting and a pipe handling system capable of running and handling range 3 drillpipe of up to 14.5 metres. The cantilever system itself has a pulling capacity of 250 tonnes and the capacity to drill wells of up to 15,000 feet (4,570m). Moving at speeds of up to 1m per minute, the WOU can be positioned over the

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substantial savings to be achieved in deploying more vessels like the Evolution.

furthest well slot from the ship in under 30 minutes.

This system is means the Evolution can undertake operations such as plugging and abandonment (P&A), light drilling, changeout of submerged pumps and completions.

On board, the drill floor and pipe deck also benefit from considerable use of automation.

An automated pipe handling system feeds pipe to the travelling assembly, and an automated roughneck secures pipe connection.

Efficiency and flexibility are therefore the key to GMS’ offering. Unlike a jack-up, for example, the Evolution is capable of a selfpropelled speed of more than 8 knots, thanks

to four 1.2-MW thrusters. Moreover, because it is self-propelled, the Evolution can also be deployed faster than a comparable drilling rig, and in a wider weather window. While a tug-towed rig could take up to two weeks to set up, a four-legged SESV jack-up can be secured over the wellhead in around 12 hours.

“We can go alongside a wellhead and deploy this in something like 45 minutes, and then we can sidetrack wells, do P&A, remove submersible pumps – even drill, but we’re not trying to reinvent in the drilling market,” Anderson added.

Coupled with an initially lower day rate than a comparable rig, GMS believes there are NEWSBASE

Can-do Dwellop has designed and supplied GMS with another system for lighter well intervention with wireline and coiled tubing. In addition, however, the cantilever is also retrofittable onto three of the company’s other SESVs – a process likely to be carried out in the near future as the clients witness the capabilities of lighter vessels like the Evolution. “It is very much a case of proving this to client and then we can retrofit this to other assets. We’re streets ahead of the competition…this isn’t two years’ work, the idea goes back many years and we’ve only really taken it seriously over the last three years when we rolled it out,” Anderson said.

That boldness seems to have been rewarded by the company’s client base. He continued: “We’re seeing a lot of interest. It’s been requested by clients before, but oil companies are not marine experts, so it is down to someone like use to take a chance.”

With industry classification now confirmed too – in September the Evolution became the first such SESV with ABS SEU certification – GMS can also show the vessel working, which should help to build confidence in the industry too.

Looking ahead, the next 18 months could be a busy period for the company. In mid2017, GMS began a 36-month contract with a national oil company (NOC) in the MENA region, and is due to begin two new long-term contracts in 2018 in support of European offshore wind projects.

As for the GMS Evolution itself, it does not currently have a charter, but Anderson said he was “confident we will have it on hire in the near future.”

Given the industry’s requirement for savings, particularly in time and efficiency, the proving of such a system may mark the beginning of new trend in shallow-water intervention – and Evolution, rather than revolution, will continue to be the watchword for GMS. n Contact: Duncan Anderson Tel:+971 2 502 8808 Web: www.gmsuae.com

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Downstream momentum This year’s ADIPEC conference expands its focus on downstream strategy, innovation and technology as the region looks to capture more of the processed value of its resources

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S much of the upstream world grapples with the bottomline realities of lower prices, downstream activity has undergone a well-publicised renaissance.

According to analysis by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), when the oil price dropped sharply during 2014, margins at major European and Asian refining hubs went up, rising by around 72% in Rotterdam and 57% in Singapore.

This is no less true for much of the Middle East, where investment in refining and selling the end products such as fuel, plastics and petrochemicals is emerging as a core business strategy among national oil companies (NOCs) looking to capture more of the processed value of their natural resources.

As the region’s biggest oil event, the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference (ADIPEC) intends to reflect that shift. “ADIPEC’s guiding purpose is to be the convening power for the global industry, a platform where the industry’s leading CEOs define and refine their strategic direction,” said Al Yasat CEO and ADIPEC 2017 chairman Ali Khalifa Al Shamsi. “Although exploration, production and export of crude oil remain the foundation of the region’s NOCs, today’s business models increasingly look beyond this, making downstream investments that accumulate benefits through each valueadded process. ADIPEC is committed to acting as a driving force in support of this evolution.”

This year the strategic conference programme includes several ministerial sessions and four global business leader

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sessions, offering panel discussions and interviews with some of the senior government and industry decision makers who are shaping the future of oil and gas. An additional four downstream global business leader sessions will focus exclusively on value-added processes. Specialised sessions within the conference programme will offer knowledge exchange in areas such as security, the offshore and marine sector, and the role of women in the energy industry.

Confirmed speakers at the conference include Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Secretary General Mohammed Barkindo, and United Arab Emirates Minister of Energy Suhail Mohamed Mazrouei, , as well as government ministers from Egypt, Oman, Bahrain, Lebanon, Nigeria and Mexico.

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They will be joined by CEOs from major NOCs, international oil companies (IOCs) and leading oilfield services firms, as well as top industry experts.

Conference sessions and panel discussions include broad-ranging knowledge exchange on achieving stable and sustainable long-term growth for the industry, including through collaboration and partnerships, innovation and efficiency of operations, enabling smart growth across the value chain, and driving investment into downstream refining and petrochemicals.

Change and industry disruption will be important topics, looking at how the petroleum industry can adapt to the changing roles of oil and natural gas in a low-carbon future.

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drives ADIPEC 2017 in oil and gas. What the conference offers has never been more important than it is today. Resource owners are getting better prices for their product, but nobody can rely on further rises to ensure their business.

The focus will continue to be on improving efficiency and reducing cost, which can only be achieved through sharing experience between companies and across borders,” Al Rawahi continued.

Getting technical As well as the strategic conference, ADIPEC offers oil and gas professionals 119 technical sessions catering for all aspects of the industry. These too will see a significant increase in scope for 2017 to include the downstream industry for the first time, as well as more sessions for specialised areas including offshore and marine exploration and production.

The technical programme will encompass all layers of the industry, including upstream and midstream sessions organised by the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), while dmg events, Global Energy, will oversee a new programme of downstream sessions.

Organisers have said that the change reflects the accelerating search for efficiency and integration in a challenging market.

“The key to growth for oil and gas companies will be to find new ideas, and to share information in the pursuit of best practice,” said Ali Al Rawahi, reservoir manager – Studies (BUH/SE Asset), at the Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Petroleum Operations Ltd (ADCO), and ADIPEC 2017 Technical Conference chairman.

Session topics include exploration and production geoscience, production facilities technologies, field development, operational excellence, drilling and completion technology, HSE, projects engineering and management, gas technology, unconventional resources, enhanced oil recovery (EOR and more.

“ADIPEC is clearly established as the leading platform for knowledge exchange NEWSBASE

2030 Strategy From a strong focus on exploration and production during the pre-2014 period of sustained high oil prices, 2015 and 2016 have emphasised innovation and improved efficiency to reduce immediate costs.

The latest changes recognise an industry adapting to a new normal. This sees investment returning to exploration and production in anticipation of rising demand, growing interest in natural gas, and a longterm imperative to add value.

As part of its integrated 2030 Strategy, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. (ADNOC), which hosts ADIPEC, is creating more profitable downstream and more valuable upstream businesses. The strategy aims to increase production capacity to 3.5 million bpd by 2018, increase gasoline production to 10.2 million tpy by 2022, and grow petrochemicals production from 4.5 million tonnes in 2016 to 11.4 million tonnes by 2025. It will also diversify its range of highvalue innovative plastics solutions.

Similar goals are being set by NOCs across the Middle East and beyond.

The emerging business approach seeks to maximise the value of each barrel that NOCs produce, by generating additional revenue from each layer of processing, distribution and sales. As well as generating more revenue, investments along the value chain can smooth out the impact of fluctuations in oil and gas prices, as rising or falling markets affect each layer of the industry differently.

Held under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE, hosted

by ADNOC and organised by the Global Energy division of dmg events, ADIPEC will be held at Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre from November 13-16, 2017. n To register for ADIPEC 2017, visit: www.visreg.adipec.com

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PDO acts to curb environmental footprint MIDDLE EAST INNOVATION

Omani national oil company moves to slash flared gas and makes progress on its solar EOR scheme

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ETROLEUM Development Oman (PDO) showed movement on two fronts in late September and early October on plans aligning the company’s own operational requirements with national green imperatives.

An initiative was launched to potential suppliers designed to conserve a portion of the country’s scarce gas reserves currently squandered through environmentally egregious flaring – with PDO also among the largest consumers of the resource for use in oil production.

Meanwhile, a milestone was reached on a ground-breaking project at a southern field to replace such gas with solar power for the generation of steam required for a thermal enhanced oil recovery (EOR) project.

PDO, the sultanate’s largest oil and gas producer, was due to receive responses in late September to a ‘request for information’ from potential suppliers of technologies for a programme to reduce the volumes of gas being flared from operations across the company’s Block 6 concession. The asset covers most of the sultanate’s onshore territory and yielded 600,000 bpd of crude last year.

According to the announcement, around 60 flares are in operation, grouped into three categories for the purposes of the tender – these being associated gas flares linked to oil operations in the North Oman and South Oman production zones, and non-associated flares arising from dedicated gas-producing operations across the acreage.

PDO professed to be seeking “the best technically and economically feasible and proven solutions to reduce/mitigate [the company’s] flaring,” with suppliers invited to submit proposals for either all or part of the work.

The company claimed to have slashed flaring by 38% in 2016 to 12.86 tonnes per 1,000 tonnes of production. Nonetheless, flaring absorbed just over 10% of the total gas consumed by the firm’s operations – at an average of 2.7 mcm per day out of 25.1

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mcm per day – while the country as a whole faces a growing shortage of the resource to meet spiralling power generation and industrial needs.

PDO, which is majority-owned by the government alongside Royal Dutch Shell, has signed up to the World Bank Zero Gas Flaring Initiative calling for the practice to be eliminated entirely by 2030.

Solar EOR Efforts by the sultanate’s flagship company to optimise the use of scarce natural resources were similarly evident in a tender floated NEWSBASE

in early September seeking technology providers for a wastewater reuse scheme at the Qarn Alam steam-injection project.

PDO has also been working from the opposite end of the production process to reduce the quantity of gas consumed in crude recovery, with the region’s first solar-based thermal EOR project – dubbed Miraah – in operation at the Awal West field in the south of Block 6.

The developer, California-based specialist Glasspoint Solar, provided an update on the scheme in early October following completion of the first of the

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MIDDLE EAST INNOVATION Left: Design render of the Glasspoint solar EOR project

Far left: The glasshouses under construction

36 ‘greenhouses’ to be installed under the ‘enclosed trough’ system being used.

The concentrated solar power plant will replace gas in the generation of the requisite steam – and at full capacity of 1,021 MW is designed to generate 6,000 tonnes per day of steam.

Glasspoint reported that costs had been reduced by 55% thus far during the scaling-up of the project from a 7-MW pilot at the same field – commissioned in 2013 – through the use of cheaper and more efficient equipment and materials.

Construction operations had also now

adapted to the harsh climate and remote location, the firm said.

When the deal was signed between the two companies in July 2015 to proceed with the commercial-scale project, total costs were estimated at US$600 million and annual gas savings on completion were put at roughly 5.6 trillion Btu. Around 25% of the gas consumed in the sultanate is absorbed in oil production through PDO’s widespread use of resourceintensive EOR technologies to maintain crude production levels.

By 2025, 25% of the company’s total output is expected to be extracted using such methods.

PDO managing director Raoul Restucci cited the landmark Miraah project on October 1 when declaring the firm’s plans to become a “fully-fledged energy company” with interests in renewables as NEWSBASE

well as in traditional oil and gas – mirroring the recently declared strategies of NOCs elsewhere in the GCC. “There are several opportunities in Oman relating to these [renewables] sectors [and] we need to start capitalising on the opportunities presented by these sectors and create jobs for locals,” he told reporters.

Restucci stated a target of generating 50,000 jobs outside the oil and gas sector over the next three years.

Oman has been slower even than its Gulf peers in developing renewable energy, while PDO’s position to spearhead national efforts to do so is more complicated than that of Saudi Aramco or Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. (ADNOC) by dint of the minimal current activity outside upstream oil, partforeign ownership by Shell, and a generally less economically dominant role than that of its GCC counterparts. n

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Underwater optics enter the fast stream Saudi Arabian researchers investigate new techniques for underwater wireless optical communication

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HILE the capabilities of robots and underwater equipment get better by the week, fast wireless communication in water remains a hurdle.

Myriad forms of wireless data transfer options are available, each with various pros and cons, but the fact remains that few will be comparable to a signal sent by wire.

Existing technologies like acoustic communications and low-frequency radio waves are limited by narrow bandwidths and the need for large antennae and high-transmission powers, making them unsuitable for streaming good-quality, realtime video.

A new project by the Saudi Arabia-based King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) has sought to pursue one avenue for sending and receiving video signals. In particular, researchers have been aiming to improve signal bandwidth to achieve better video quality.

The research was undertaken by PhD student Abdullah Al-Halafi, with supervisor Associate Professor Dr. Basem Shihada and colleagues. The group used underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) systems, which consume significantly less power and offer the higher bandwidths required for streaming live video.

Better bandwidth “We first built the real-time video transmission system and then integrated it into an UWOC setup,” Al-Halafi said.

“Although the design and development of the system were very challenging, its ability to be programmed enabled us to reconfigure the system into several different arrangements.”

The team used a technique called

Abdullah Al-Halafi (left), with Associate Professor Dr. Basem Shihada. Photo: KAUST quadrature amplitude modulation to increase the representation of information carried by the signal for a given bandwidth. Dr. Shihada explained to InnovOil via email that this “is a coding technique that is commonly used in digital telecommunications and wireless applications. Its main benefit comes from increasing the effective bandwidth, as the basic implementation is based on combining two amplitude modulated signals into a single channel.”

The signal was then compared with phase-shift keying, which changes the phase of the carrier signal, while optimising the transmission for each configuration. To check how well the system performed, the team developed an innovative algorithm to measure errors that occur during transmission called the bit error rate.

Also, by passing the signal through a 5-metre trough containing water of differing turbidity, they were able to test the quality of the video under different types of ocean water.

All in all, the system showed a tested bandwidth of 2.3 Gb/s. “Our system NEWSBASE

produced the highest-quality video streaming so far achieved in UWOC systems and provides a reconfigurable and cost-effective communications system for underwater live video streaming,” said AlHalafi.

In terms of using the technology in commercial applications, Dr. Shihada pointed to a number of different possibilities: “Being able to demonstrate a video transmission over underwater visible light communication over (D) metres is novel. The distance (D) can vary, as we can always place mirrors to reflect the laser light at different angels and make (D) longer, [but in general] the longer the distance the worse the signal is. This is due to the fact that the signal fades over the transmission medium.”

“As for our experiments performed in the lab, the 5-metre value was selected because of the size of the water tank used. I anticipate that we can go beyond 5 metres, but we will need more mirrors and repeaters to strength the signal,” he added.

The team is now analysing the end-to-end delay component of sending live video traffic into underwater optical channels. n

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New energy conversion Nanostructured catalyst enables carbon dioxide and methane to be converted into fuels

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IRECT conversion of carbon and hydrocarbon molecules into useful fuels has been an area of significant activity in recent years, as researchers look for ways of limiting CO2 emissions, or methods of turning them into something more useful to the energy industry.

Ethanol has been one area of particular focus. Indeed, last year a team at the US Department of Energy’s (DoE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) discovered a nanostructured catalyst made of carbon, copper and nitrogen capable of turning carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O) directly into ethanol (C2H6O) with the application of a voltage. The team described it as “essentially [reversing] the combustion process.”

A new process with similar results was published by a team from the UK’s University of Liverpool in September. In a paper published in chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie, the group reported a plasma synthesis process which allowed for the direct, one-step activation of CO2 and methane (CH4) into other “higher value” fuels and chemicals, including acetic acid, methanol, ethanol and formaldehyde. Moreover, the process could be performed at room temperature and atmospheric pressure.

This catalysis is markedly different from the typical systems for synthetic gas (syngas) production which traditionally require high additional energy inputs and/ or pressure controls.

According to the researchers’ paper, nonthermal plasmas (NPT) – any plasma in which there is a net flow of energy – has been used for removing

From the top: acetic acid, methanol, ethanol and formaldehyde molecules NEWSBASE

gas pollutants, but not in direct chemical conversion applications.

In NPTs, the gas temperature remains low while the electrons are highly energetic – enough to activate inert molecules such as CO2 and CH4 and produce new reactive chemicals.

According to their reported results, acetic acid is the largest product created, but also acetone, methanol, ethanol and formaldehyde. The products and volume created can be adjusted through the alteration of the ratio of CH4 and CO2, as well as the type of catalyst.

What makes the system advantageous, they argue, is that these systems can be scaled up and down, and the steady rate of catalysis means production can be turned on and off quickly and with little additional energy inputs, meaning the system could be used easily on-demand. This “offers a promising route for the plasma process powered by renewable energy (e.g. wind and solar power) to act as an efficient chemical energy storage localised or distributed system,” the University says.

In addition to renewables, it could also be used to convert excess CH4 into usable fuels, avoiding the need for flaring at oil and gas wells.

“These results clearly show that nonthermal plasmas offer a promising solution to overcome the thermodynamic barrier for the direct transformation of CH4 and CO2 into a range of strategically important platform chemicals and synthetic fuels at ambient conditions. Introducing a catalyst into the plasma chemical process, known as plasma-catalysis, could tune the selectivity of target chemicals,” commented co-author Dr. Xin Tu of the University’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics. n

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Latest advancements in drilling riser analysis technology Wood director of drilling Donogh Lang explains how new analysis is enabling drilling operations in some of the world’s most challenging environments

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ESPITE the ‘lower for longer’ oil price environment, operators continue to explore for, and develop, oil and gas resources in the most challenging offshore environments worldwide. Exploration or development drilling is currently ongoing or planned in deepwater locations characterised by large water depths, powerful ocean currents and high sea states.

To drill in these locations cost-effectively requires careful planning of operations to minimise non-productive time (NPT). A significant aspect of this planning involves analysis of the marine drilling riser system in order to establish the limiting environmental (or metocean) conditions for particular riser operations. Wood’s proprietary system, DeepRiser, is one such modelling tool to aid the design and analysis of drilling and toptensioned production riser systems.

In this article, Lang explores three recent technology developments that are enabling drilling to be undertaken in some of the world’s most challenging locations.

Drift-off Drilling operations in deep and ultra-

deepwaters are now nearly universally disconnected from the well at the lower carried out using dynamically positioned marine riser package (LMRP). The timing of (DP) drilling vessels. DP vessels maintain this sequence is crucial – the riser must be station relative to the well, using thrusters disconnected before any of the loads in the operated by a sophisticated control system riser or the well system exceed the capacity to counteract any environmental forces. of the equipment, to avoid permanent A key consideration when drilling from damage. a DP vessel is what happens In practice, watch circles if the system develops a fault are used to ensure the “Dynamically EDS is initiated in a timely and the vessel is unable to maintain station. The types manner. Watch circles are positioned of fault that can lead to this set thresholds, in the form (DP) drilling scenario include a total loss of horizontal distances from vessels maintain the well, which define when of power, drive-off and failure of individual thrusters. Of station relative the EDS must be initiated. these scenarios, usually the to the well, using Usually there are two watch most critical is a total loss circles – yellow and red. The thrusters operated red watch circle is the last of power – this can lead to a drift-off event, where the by a sophisticated point at which the EDS must vessel is pushed off-station by control system” be started and the yellow is environmental forces. when preparations for the EDS If this situation occurs, should start. it is necessary to disconnect the drilling Various approaches exist for calculating riser from the well to prevent permanent watch circle location. The simplest is to damage – a process known as an emergency define these as a fixed percentage of the disconnect sequence (EDS). During the water depth. Although this approach was EDS, the well is first sealed in by the blowonce commonplace, it suffers from the major out preventer (BOP) and the riser is then drawback of not accounting for metocean NEWSBASE

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Well head model (top) and drift off results (left) as seen in DeepRiser

conditions, and it has been shown that this could result in damage to the riser or well.

For this reason it has largely fallen out of favour.

A more realistic approach is to perform a simulation of the vessel on its own to predict its drift-off path. The forces generated are calculated as functions of the wind speed and direction, the surface current speed and direction and the sea state. These are applied in a dynamic simulation that calculates the trajectory of the vessel during drift-off. The trajectory is then applied to a finite element (FE) global model of the riser system, to determine the point at which the riser must be disconnected to avoid damage (the socalled point of disconnect or POD), from which the red and yellow watch circles can be found. Although this ‘uncoupled’ approach is still sometimes used, the major disadvantage is that it does not account for the effect that the riser has on the drift-off trajectory of the vessel.

The state-of-the-art approach for watch circle calculation, and the one employed by DeepRiser, is to use a fully coupled scheme that includes both vessel and riser in a single model. Dynamic analysis is performed, in

which the environmental forces acting on the vessel (and riser) are calculated and applied. The result is a prediction of the vessel drift-off trajectory that fully accounts for the effect of the riser, and calculates the POD and watch circles with the highest accuracy.

A major advantage of the fully coupled approach is that it avoids potential overconservatism. This can be significant: especially in harsh environments, any overconservatism in the calculation of the watch circles could result in suspended operations, which could have a substantial impact on NPT and drilling costs.

Emergency disconnect There are a number of emergency scenarios – including drift-off – that can require disconnection of the riser. The physics of an emergency disconnect are complex and there are several special factors that must be considered when simulating this scenario.

The first is the behaviour of the riser tensioner system. In an emergency disconnect, the tensioner has to be able to respond by lifting the riser enough so that the LMRP moves well clear of the BOP, NEWSBASE

while reducing the overall tension applied to the riser. All this must be achieved without damage to any of the equipment.

The tensioner system uses a number of large hydraulic cylinders energised by an array of air pressure vessels (APVs) to develop tension that is applied to the riser.

An anti-recoil valve (ARV) is also situated on the hydraulic piping that connects the tensioner cylinders to the APVs (via a hydraulic accumulator). The purpose of the APV is to throttle the flow of hydraulic fluid to the tensioner cylinders during an accident, such as a riser parting or an emergency disconnect. Throttling the flow has the effect of reducing the tension in a controlled way.

Previously for drilling riser analysis, the tension applied by the riser tensioner was commonly modelled as a constant, vertical point load at the top of the riser. Such a simplistic approach was insufficient to model the behaviour of the tensioner in an emergency disconnect.

Instead, DeepRiser incorporates a detailed hydro-pneumatic model that includes the individual hydraulic and pneumatic components of the tensioner

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November 2017

Tensioner model

system. Each individual tensioner cylinder Being able to model this accurately is of can be modelled independently, allowing particular importance for harsh deepwater the programme to simulate the threeenvironments. The water depths require dimensional response of the riser system to the use of higher riser top tension that, an emergency disconnect. when combined with vessel heave response The second challenge associated with in heavy seas, can reduce the range of simulating an emergency metocean conditions in disconnect event is modelling which the riser can be safely the behaviour of the drilling disconnected to very small mud within the riser. Drilling levels. Therefore it is essential mud is used to provide to verify that the riser can pressure control within the be safely handled while well and to remove drill maintaining an economically bit cuttings. The density viable operating envelope. of the drilling mud varies, but it is generally heavier Wellhead and conductor than seawater. Mud is rarely Recent developments in the retained within the riser after drilling industry have led to an disconnect – the bottom increased focus on the fatigue “The detailed of the LMRP is open to the of the wellhead and conductor model bridges the casing that can occur surrounding seawater and, because the mud is heavier gap between older during drilling, workover than seawater, it flows out of plug and abandonment composite models and the bottom of the LMRP. This (P&A) operations. These and the more phenomenon has a significant developments include the effect on the behaviour of increased use of modern intricate 3-D the riser, as it causes a large sixth-generation mobile local models” downward drag load. offshore drilling units that Donogh Lang , To model this accurately, carry larger and heavier BOP Wood director of drilling stacks, and the requirement DeepRiser integrates a finite volume (FV) mud flow model to conduct a greater level of with the FE structural model of the riser. well intervention operations to maximise The fluid flow model captures the complex recovery from existing reservoirs. physics of the column of mud within DeepRiser includes features that allow the drilling riser as it collapses following the wellhead, conductor, casing strings, emergency disconnect and the effect that intermediate cement and soil structure this has on the riser response. to be modelled with a degree of accuracy NEWSBASE

previously not available in a global riser analysis tool. Through the use of pipein-pipe models, the software allows the individual strings that make up the well structure to be explicitly modelled. This provides a much higher level of accuracy than that provided by traditional ‘composite’ models, where the properties of each of the strings making up the well are combined into a single structure.

The detailed wellhead/conductor/ casing model bridges the gap between the older composite models previously used for global analysis and the more intricate three-dimensional local models typically developed for component analysis using FE analysis packages. These improved predictions are essential to demonstrating the feasibility of the intended operations.

Conclusions As easy-to-access resources are depleted, further exploration in harsher deepwater locations is inevitable. Ensuring exploration can be carried out in an economically sustainable way demands the use of the latest digital technologies capable of simulating drilling operations with the highest level of accuracy. Wood’s DeepRiser tool is one such technology helping to maximise the viability of drilling operations in some of world’s most challenging environments. n Contact: Donogh Lang, Director- Drilling Tel: +353 (0)91 48 1210 Email: Donogh.Lang@woodplc.com Web: www.woodplc.com

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Researchers make pellets from bitumen and heavy oil New supply method could allow easier transport by rail without the need for heated wagons

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UNIVERSITY of Calgary research team has come up with a new way to transport bitumen and conventional heavy oil by converting the resources into self-sealing pellets.

University of Calgary petroleum and chemical engineering professor Ian Gates, who heads the research team, said the pellets can be transported by truck and rail, making it easier to send oil to various markets. In other words, shipping will not be limited to pipeline access points.

“With this, we can put it in a standard rail car,” Gates told CBC in a September interview.

“It can go to any port where a rail car goes, which is an immense number of them, to get product out from North America.” He said the pellets, which are given rough, albeit coated, surfaces to prevent them from sticking together, could be shipped via thousands of rail cars built for coal that are now sitting idle.

“I don’t think it will replace pipelines. This just offers one more mode of transport. But, certainly, you could see it displacing some of the heated railcars,” he told press.

Gates and his research team have developed the technology so that it can make pellets of various sizes at the wellhead.

According to Gates, who has forecast the end of steam use in oil sands drilling projects, the process uses about the same amount of energy as is necessary to add diluents to bitumen for pipeline transport.

“Think Advil,” Gates told CBC, referring to aspirin pills. “You have the chemical material...we’re then exposing that material, on the outside, to a set of heat, pressure conditions that then yield an asphaltine-rich coating. So really [it is] just a coating that bounds the inner material.”

According to Gates, the technology eliminates the need for polymers or other additives, which have been tried as coatings

Ian Gates at the University of Calgary’s Schulich School of Engineering for bitumen – nor does it need complex additional equipment such as microwaves.

Air bubbles can be injected into the pellets to keep them buoyant and avoid hazardous oil spills. “They’re nice and hardy,” Gates told CBC. “If you put them in water, they’ll sit like that for a very long time. It’s a safe product for transport.”

The research team and Innovate Calgary,

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the school’s technology and business incubation centre, are working to bring the pellets to a pilot project and eventual commercial production.

“We were able [to] connect with potential industry partners and customers who might help advance the technology to a field trial, and ultimately, a full-scale solution,” Innovate Calgary’s vice president of energy, Stace Wills, told CBC. Plans call for the fully automated technology to be producing barrels of the tiny balls in a pilot project by November. The project’s scale is slated to increase gradually over one year to several hundred barrels per day of production.

After shipment, the pellets can be mixed with diluent and upgraded in conventional fashion, or can remain as pellets and be used as feedstock for road paving. “In that case, all you do is sell the solid to those markets,” Gates told CBC. Ironically, Gates and his team came upon their potentially ground-breaking discovery by accident. “We were trying to upgrade bitumen and learned how to degrade it instead,” Gates told University of Calgary publication UToday.

As a result, the technology that produces the little balls was almost mothballed.

“We put it on the shelf for quite a while, because who would want bitumen pellets?” Gates told UToday. “It turns out there’s a huge market for this stuff.” n

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Yara unveils electric

Kongsberg and Yara unveil design and test-model for battery-electric

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HE development of electric and autonomous shipping continues at an exceptional pace.

Having outlined its plans to build and operate an electric battery-powered, self-driving container vessel at its Norwegian factory in May, Yara has already approved a design. A model version of the “Yara Birkeland” is now being tested in SINTEF Ocean’s 80m sea laboratory in Trondheim.

The ship will eventually be used to move products from Yara’s Porsgrunn production plant to global shipping hubs in Brevik and Larvik. If the project proceeds as planned, Yara says it will remove up to 40,000 truck journeys per year from the road between the two locations.

Yara Birkeland is being developed in collaboration with marine engineer Kongsberg Maritime, and has been designed by fellow Norwegian company Marin Teknikk. Norwegian government enterprise ENOVA has also committed to supporting the project with a 133 million krone (US$17 million) financial contribution, which the

group says will cover one third of the cost.

Kongsberg is responsible for the development and delivery of the key enabling technologies, including the sensors required for remote and autonomous operations, as well as the electric drive, battery and propulsion control systems.

The final vessel is 79.5m long by 14.8m wide, although information on its deadweight at maximum draft is not yet available.

Nevertheless, the scale model tested at SINTEF is by no means small, weighing in at 2.4 tonnes and measuring 6m long. It also includes a fully working thruster system designed by Kongsberg, one of the main systems to undergo testing in the tanks before construction starts.

“Initial tests of the model were successful, proving both concept and the technology,” remarked Kongsberg president and CEO Geir Håøy. “The testing at SINTEF Ocean marks an important milestone in the development. This vessel is important for the entire maritime industry, and Yara deserves praise for their initiative and NEWSBASE

commitment. Yara Birkeland is the start of a major contribution to fulfilling national and vinternational environmental impact goals, and will be a global milestone for seaborne transportation.”

ENOVA CEO Nils Kristian Nakstad

Terje Søviknes (Norwegian petroleum and energy

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vessel design

autonomous ship

also noted that this would prove a valuable project in qualifying autonomous technology as a viable route for other industries and countries: “The interest in autonomous transport is great, but at the same time, many are sceptical and question the safety.

The key contribution from this project is to demonstrate that autonomous and electric sea transport is feasible, and will deliver the results we want.”

In May, Yara finance and logistics manager Bjørn Tore Orvik told InnovOil that he

minister), Svein Tore Holsether (Yara), Geir Håøy (Kongsberg) and Vegard Johansen (SINTEF) NEWSBASE

expected the ship would run on a battery of around 3.5 to 4-MWh capacity. He added that the 70m long vessel would hold around 100-150 containers, making 1-2 shipments per day, five days week.

The Porsgrunn-Brevik leg is around 13 km or less – an easy feat for battery power alone.

However, the challenge will be managing the longer trip to Larvik, a distance of around 30 nautical miles (55 km). Orvik said that charging would take around 2 hours, and would be straightforward at the factory and port because the sites had enough spare grid capacity.

The shipyard taking on the contract will be selected by the end of 2017, with the vessel due for launching in the first quarter of 2019.

Fully autonomous operations would then begin in 2020.

Some may be sceptical, but the reality is that the passage to fully autonomous, fully electric shipping is now well under way.

The race is now on to see which pioneering operator will arrive first at this brave new world. n

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COMMENTARY

Big data comes to the North Sea The price crash has made digitisation an appealing option to keep down costs and enhance efficiencies for operators in the North Sea, Jeremy Bowden writes

D

IGITALISATION has been a while in coming to the oil and gas sector, but now it is becoming a key feature in the industry. The weak oil price has forced operators to re-evaluate their spending and digitalisation has proved itself to be an important factor in driving down costs.

Digitalisation involves the conversion of text, pictures or sound into a digital form that can be processed and analysed by a computer. Digital oilfield technologies enable companies to capture more data, at high frequency, from smart sensors and analyse it in real time, or near real time.

Globally, annual offshore spending in the sector is forecast to reach US$17.8 billion by 2022, and overall – including onshore and shale – the digital oilfield market is poised to surpass US$30.7 billion by 2020. But these spending figures are trivial compared to the potential upside.

According to a recent report from the World Economic Forum, a full digital transformation in the oil and gas sector could eventually unlock about US$1.6 trillion of value globally for the industry, its customers and wider society. Oxford Economics, on the other hand, puts the added value at US$816 billion, or 0.8% of global GDP by 2025.

This value comes from the optimisation of reservoir, well and facility development and performance, based on analysis of data from a fully digitised system. Further value

is realised by using virtual models generated from the data, which enables testing and assessing the lowest cost development options.

Similarly, models can be used to predict maintenance, cutting unplanned outages, while operational lessons learned can easily be shared for mutual benefit.

However, wiring up systems also requires the installation of measures to ensure cybersecurity.

North Sea retrofit In the North Sea, digitalisation has contributed to the recent sharp cost cutting, and is making development of brownfield projects much easier, as options can easily be evaluated using accurate modelling.

“Digitalisation of industrial processes that give you those incremental gains have undoubtedly contributed to the 40% cost reductions in the North Sea since the oil price downturn,” Graeme Gordon, CEO of IFB and head of Scotland’s digital federation, Scotland IS, told InnovOil. However, with most of the assets already in place the job is not straight forward and involves a lot of retrofitting to unsuitable old equipment.

“We are in a brownfield environment, so there are few fully fledged digital oilfields [DOFs]. An exception is Maersk’s Culzean platform, which is a relatively advanced digital platform that can collect and flow terabytes of data on and off the platform.

By introducing core infrastructure upfront, NEWSBASE

as they have done, operating costs can be reduced by US$10 million per year.”

Once the data is collected, it must be decided which bits are useful. “The average [North Sea] oil rig now produces about a terabyte per day of data. Around 90% of that is read-only, and is irrelevant so just passes through – it’s the 10% that is significant that you want. Then you turn that into intelligence using data analytics,” said Gordon.

For example, digitalisation can separately analyse production and choke points at hundreds of wells, accurately dis-aggregating production data so that conditions can be adjusted to optimise output at each well – increasing asset production efficiency in existing oilfields as a result. In a fully “connected enterprise”, assets can be monitored and optimised from anywhere in real time.

“The pace of change in the oil and gas

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COMMENTARY Maersk’s Culzean platform is a relatively advanced digital platform that can collect and analyse terabytes of data

sector has never been faster and to thrive, companies must become more efficient,” said Macario Namie, head of IoT strategy at Cisco, told InnovOil. “And like most industries, the oil and gas sector is creating a huge amount of data. In order to derive value from all the connected ‘things,’ this data must be extracted from its disparate sources and moved to applications that create business value.”

One way of creating value with the data is machine learning – a process in which software is used to search data, detect patterns and assess the likelihood of future failures. The software uses algorithms – a series of calculations and automated reasoning tasks – to help overcome potentially troublesome equipment, and predict failures so preventive maintenance can be carried out. The data can also be used to create a virtual ‘twin’ that can be used to

simulate different field development options, helping work out the cheapest and most effective course of action.

From warehouses to libraries And it is not just a company’s own data that are available. Much of the data is accumulated by third parties and can be offered to the wider industry.

“Cognitive learning can take in mistakes from all 450 platforms in the North Sea. We can all learn from each other and all the other rigs worldwide too. When something happens, all other installations learn from it instantly – in the same way that Google search learns every day from every search,” said Gordon. “It’s now possible to turn data warehouses into libraries, which can be a relevant source for many people, helped by automated systems,” he added.

Namie said the flow of data needed to NEWSBASE

be flexible and handled carefully: “An oil company with rigs pulling in terabytes of data might not want to send it all back to the datacentre – some needs to be kept local and processed at the edge. Some can be shared with other stakeholders or third parties. As data is moved around to ensure it gets to the right applications at the right time, there is also a necessity to enforce policies around data ownership, privacy and cybersecurity.”

While cybersecurity concerns may be a rising consequence of the digital transition, utilising advanced analytics and simulation tools to optimise assets and operations has become one of the few ways to succeed in today’s low-price environment.

Looking ahead, continued technological progress, particularly in big-data analytics, is expected to keep driving efficiency in the US shale industry, as well as in offshore provinces such as the North Sea. n

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HyJump JIP to examine hydrate blockage risk in subsea jumpers The University of Western Australia (UWA) is leading a joint industry project (JIP), supported by the Industry Technology Facilitator (ITF), to provide industry with a better understanding of the mechanism of hydrate growth and blockages.

The 12-month study, entitled ‘Hydrate Deposit Growth in Subsea Jumpers (HyJump)’, currently has the support of industry partners, including Chevron, Total and Woodside, and is welcoming more participants to join the project.

To simulate the flow geometry and risk of hydrate blockage in subsea equipment, the project will see the development of a new 2” jumper test section on the Hytra flowloop, owned by CSIRO and jointly operated by CSIRO and UWA, in Western Australia. This will be used to characterise the growth rate and severity of hydrate blockage formation in this subsea geometry, which will provide unique insight into management methods for transient, multiphase conditions.

The results of the study may be used to determine how a temporary or permanent reduction in hydrate management chemicals, such as Thermodynamic Hydrate Inhibitors (THI), affects the risk of blockage over a variety of restart conditions. Results will also allow assessing how Low Dosage Hydrate Inhibitors (LDHIs) can prevent such blockages.

Will Davies, General Manager with ITF, said: “While previous studies have evaluated hydrate blockage risk for inclined pipe segments, the HyJump Project seeks to enhance that knowledge further. It will investigate the viability of allowing gas to sweep liquids from the affected section, further analysis of chemical injection to clear blockages and aims to deliver novel insight

and experimental data that may be used to enhance existing multiphase flow/analysis tools, or service as a guideline to support risk-based system designs or operating conditions.”

Fourteen tests will be performed with the simulated jumper and the results will provide new experimental evidence to determine the criteria and allowable conditions to restart subsea gas pipelines hydrate-inhibition strategies may be viable for high-risk geometries in the future. n ITF

Tendeka secures trio of Middle East contracts Following a recent award by the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) to deliver a lower completions project, Tendeka, a global leader in advanced completions and production optimisation, has been awarded two further contracts in the Middle East.

The multi-million-pound agreements with the Abu Dhabi Onshore Operations Company (ADCO) and Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) will involve the supply of a range of specialised Inflow Control technologies. These technologies enable the effective management of the reservoir in horizontal wells to increase productivity and improve oil recovery.

ADCO’s three-year contract, with a one-year extension, will involve Tendeka’s market-leading zonal isolation products, and full range of inflow control technologies, including their market-leading FloSure Autonomous ICD to be installed across all ADCO fields.

PDO has awarded Tendeka a multi-well trial and one-year deployment contract for the application of FloSure Autonomous ICD across Oman.

The multi-million-pound deal with Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) will involve

NEWSBASE

Tendeka installing Advanced ICD equipment in 55 horizontal wells over two years in Northern Kuwait.

Tendeka is the world leader in ICD technology and has installed over 7,000 passive ICDs and 20,000 autonomous ICDs globally. n TENDEKA

Subsea 7 wins Fortuna LNG work Subsea 7 was awarded an integrated contract

by Ophir Energy for the Fortuna LNG project offshore Equatorial Guinea, located in average water depths of 1,790 metres. The substantial contract was awarded to Subsea Integration Alliance, which is a partnership between Subsea 7 and OneSubsea The Upstream EPCIC (engineering, procurement, construction, installation and commissioning) contract will be delivered as part of an integrated solution combining subsea umbilicals, risers and flowlines (SURF) and subsea production systems (SPS).

Four deepwater wells will be tied-back to a subsea manifold and connected to a FLNG vessel by steel lazy-wave risers, a cost effective riser solution. EPCIC operations will commence after the final investment decision and offshore operations are scheduled for 2020.

Along with the EPCIC contract, Ophir Energy has awarded the contract for future inspection, repair and maintenance (IRM) services to Subsea Integration Alliance.

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Fortuna developement plan

Gilles Lafaye, VP Africa for Subsea 7, said: “This award demonstrates the cost effective and collaborative solutions that Subsea Integration Alliance can bring to our clients.

We look forward to working with OneSubsea and Ophir Energy to successfully deliver and maintain this FLNG project offshore Equatorial Guinea.” n SUBSEA 7

Chevron abandons Great Bight plans

Exploration Permits for Petroleum (EPPs) 44 and 45, which occupy an area of over 32,000 square km in the Great Australian Bight Basin, in October 2013.

Although it has ended exploration in the region, Chevron has reaffirmed its commitment to its Australian natural gas business. Earlier this month, Chevron was awarded 50% operating interests in three blocks in the Northern Carnarvon Basin – WA-528-P, WA-529-P and WA-530-P – in partnership with Woodside Energy.

Chevron is not the first operator to exit the Great Australian Bight Basin. BP had initially planned to drill the Stromlo-1 and Whinham-1 – the first two wells of a multiyear exploration programme – in the Great Australian Bight in the EPP 37, EPP 38, EPP 39 and EPP 40 permits.

A newbuild drilling rig, the Diamond Offshore Ocean GreatWhite, was hired to kick-start the programme, which was set to begin in early 2017. However, the plan was cancelled owing to environmental concerns.

Chevron is the largest resource holder in Australia with 50 tcf (1.4 tcm) of net unrisked gas resources, as well as being the operator of the Gorgon and Wheatstone LNG projects. In the coming weeks, the first Wheatstone LNG cargo will be shipped. At full capacity, the Wheatstone project’s twotrain LNG facility will supply 8.9 million tpy of LNG to customers in Asia. The facility will process natural gas from the Chevronoperated Wheatstone and Iago fields n Edited by Andrew Kemp Andrew.kemp@newsbase.com

CHEVRON Australia has decided to discontinue the Australian Great Bight deepwater exploration programme in a commercial decision made during the same month that its Wheatstone LNG project came online.

“While the Great Australian Bight is one of Australia’s most prospective frontier hydrocarbon regions, in the current low oil price environment, it was not able to compete for capital in Chevron’s global portfolio,” the super-major said in a statement.

According to its most recent annual report, Chevron’s capital budget for 2017 is US$19.8 billion, 12% lower than 2016 levels and 42% less than its budget in 2015. Global exploration allocation accounts for roughly US$1 billion of the super-major’s budget in 2017.

Chevron acquired the two deepwater

Keppel secures major FPSO conversion project from SBM Offshore Keppel Shipyard has secured a Floating Production Storage and Offloading vessel (FPSO) conversion contract from longstanding customer, SBM Offshore.

The contract is for the conversion of a Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) into an FPSO, which upon completion, will be deployed to the Liza field, located approximately 193km offshore Guyana in the Stabroek block.

The shipyard’s work scope includes refurbishment and life extension works, such as the upgrading of living quarters, fabrication and installation of spread mooring systems, as well as the installation and integration of topside modules.

Managing director (Conversions and Repairs), Keppel O&M and managing director, Keppel Shipyard, Chor How Jat said: ““We are pleased to undertake the conversion of this FPSO, which is our 25th major project from SBM Offshore. It is testament to Keppel’s expertise in FPSO conversions and the strong partnership we have developed with SBM Offshore since Keppel Shipyard’s first delivery in 1981.”

Great Bight Marine Park

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The converted FPSO will have a storage capacity of 1.6 million barrels of crude oil and is capable of producing up to 120,000 barrels of oil per day. The vessel will have a gas treatment capacity of circa 170 million standard cubic feet per day and a water injection capacity of circa 200,000 barrels of water per day. n KEPPEL

Gazprom set to launch Serbian UGS, refining projects Russia ’s Gazprom aims to begin an overhaul of Serbia’s main oil refinery before the end of the year and start an expansion project at the country’s only underground gas storage (UGS) facility in 2018.

The Serbian government reported on the plans last week, following talks between its energy ministry and Gazprom officials in Moscow. Gazprom Neft, a subsidiary of Russia’s natural gas champion, has been tasked with modernising Serbia’s 96,000 bpd Pancevo oil refinery near Belgrade.

At a cost of 300 million euros (US$352 million), the project will raise efficiency and refining depth at the facility, which was first commissioned in the late 1960s. It is slated for completion in 2019.

Gazprom Neft controls a 56.15% stake in the plant’s operator, Serbian energy group NIS, while another 29.87% share is held by Belgrade. NIS also manages a 10,000 bpd refinery in Novi Sad, also in northern Serbia.

The company completed the first stage of modernisation at the Pancevo plant in late 2012, bringing its products in line with Euro-5 fuel standards. Under this stage, the facility’s refining depth was lifted to 84% and its production of light petroleum fuels was expanded.

NIS has seen its performance flag in recent years as a result of low oil prices.

However, the company managed a fourfold rise in profits in the first half of 2017 to 12.4 billion Serbian dinar (US$122 million), from 3.1 billion dinar (US$30.5 million) a year earlier.

The CEO of Gazprom, Alexey Miller, met with Serbian Energy Minister Aleksandar Antic to discuss gas market affairs. After the talks, Belgrade said it expected the Russian company to begin work expanding

the Banatski Dvor UGS unit in northern Serbia in 2018. In June, Gazprom signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Serbian gas company Srbijagas on studying the project’s technical and financial feasibility.

The facility can currently store up to 450 mcm of gas, but its capacity is scheduled to be expanded to 1 bcm following an investment of around 70 million euros (US$82 million). Srbijagas has a 49% stake in Banatski Dvor, while Gazprom owns the remaining 51% holding. The expansion is aimed at boosting Serbia’s energy security.

In a Gazprom statement on October 3, it was noted that Russian gas deliveries to the country had risen 31.7% on the year in the first nine months of 2017. Under the ten-year supply deal struck in 2013, the country took 1.75 bcm of gas in 2016, up 4.3% year on year. n Edited by Ryan Stevenson ryans@newsbase.com

YPF and Schlumberger move forward in Vaca Muerta Argentina ’s state-run energy company YPF and global oilfield services giant Schlumberger have agreed to move forward on a pilot project in the Vaca Muerta shale play.

The companies last week finalised all the terms of a preliminary agreement struck in April to develop Bandurria Sur, a block in the oil window of the play. This means that YPF can farm out a 49% stake in the block to Schlumberger’s SPM Argentina unit, which can start the US$390 million pilot, the staterun company said last week in a filing with the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange.

SPM will handle all of the investment, while YPF will operate the block under a 35-year licence.

Bandurria Sur is adjacent to Loma Campana, which YPF is developing in partnership with Chevron. Loma Campana is the most prolific block in the play so far, producing a gross 63,300 boepd, according to YPF data.

YPF is developing the Vaca Muerta for production growth in the medium term, while looking at heavy crude and the largely untapped offshore for longer-term NEWSBASE

growth. In the short term, the strategy involves producing more from conventional reserves with enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques while launching pilots and initial production (IP) in the Vaca Muerta and a series of tight gas plays, YPF’s chairman, Miguel Gutierrez, said last month.

For Schlumberger, this is the first investment in the Vaca Muerta. The pilot will include the drilling of 26 wells and the construction of infrastructure to handle output.

The Vaca Muerta is attracting more investment, with government estimates suggesting this will rise to an annual US$20 billion in 2019 from US$7 billion this year.

This is anticipated to help push up overall oil production to 560,000 bpd in 2025 from 475,000 bpd this year, and gas to 185 mcm per day from 122 mcm per day over the same period. n Edited by Ryan Stevenson ryans@newsbase.com

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Vaca Muerta, Argentina

Petrobras welcomed the decision, saying: “The company considers the loosening of local content demands a positive sign for the competitivity of the oil and gas industry in Brazil and will analyse the impacts of the adjustments made effective together with its partners.”

Brazilian shipyards have suffered delays converting hulls for FPSOs and the Petrobras-led Libra consortium – which also includes Royal Dutch Shell, Total and Chinese companies CNPC and CNOOC – had argued the Libra FPSO would cost 40% more to build in Brazil.

But shipbuilders said the decision would be disastrous for their industry, which has already shed 52,000 jobs since the Car Wash scandal flared up. Petrobras has had to turn to Asian shipyards for the construction of a number of FSPO hulls owing to bottlenecks at Brazilian yards. n Edited by Ryan Stevenson ryans@newsbase.com

TechnipFMC to acquire Plexus’ exploration wellhead business Petrobras satisfied with local content ruling The recent decision by Brazil’s regulator, the National Oil Agency (ANP), to exempt Petrobras and its partners in a pre-salt project from some expensive ‘local content’ requirements has been hailed by many in the industry.

But Brazilian shipbuilders said the move could spell the death-knell for their struggling industry, which had been buoyed by government regulations stipulating that minimum percentages of goods and services be built in Brazil.

“The news is positive for Petrobras,” Vitor Suzaki, an analyst at Sao Paolo-based brokerage Leroso, told NewsBase Intelligence

(NBI). Even though Suzaki noted that Brazil’s state-run oil giant had only succeeded in winning some of the exemptions it wanted, he said the decision would help cut costs and could make upcoming bid rounds the ANP is planning more attractive.

The request for the waiver for a FPSO unit that the Petrobras-led consortium needs for the Libra field in Brazil’s Santos Basin had been seen as a test case. The company argued that as well as bringing down costs, the waiver was necessary given that many Brazilian shipyards were struggling with financial problems caused by the Car Wash corruption scandal.

In its ruling on October 4, the ANP maintained local content levels of between 10-85% for the installation and integration of modules and anchor systems. It reduced some levels, such as electrical systems. And it gave Petrobras an exemption for the hull, tanks and turbines, meaning they can be constructed abroad.

NEWSBASE

TechnipFMC has reached an agreement with Plexus Holding to acquire Plexus’s Wellhead exploration equipment and services business for jack up applications. In conjunction with TechnipFMC’s global footprint and market presence, this portfolio expansion in the mudline and high pressure high temperature (HPHT) arena enables TechnipFMC to be a leading provider of products and services to the global jack up exploration drilling market.

The business will be integrated into the TechnipFMC Surface Technologies segment and will include the transfer of key personnel from Plexus, with their specialized knowhow, to ensure continuity and ongoing customer support. The business will continue to operate from the existing location in Dyce, Aberdeen, UK. Completion of the transaction is subject to the satisfaction of certain closing conditions.

Richard Alabaster, President of TechnipFMC’s Surface Technologies business, stated: “I am very pleased that we have reached this agreement, which fits

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within TechnipFMC Surface Technologies’ strategy to extend and strengthen our position in exploration-drilling products and services while leveraging our global field presence. It also enhances TechnipFMC’s capability in HPHT applications.” n TECHNIP FMC

Aramco offshore contracting picks up AFTER a summer lull, tendering activity picked up again for the quintet of contractors exclusively eligible for work on the offshore operations of state oil giant Saudi Aramco.

Signatories to the company’s coveted “longterm agreements (LTAs)” are expecting awards imminently on three engineering, procurement, construction and installation (EPCI) packages – including a major contract at the supergiant Safaniya oilfield.

Meanwhile, four smaller packages have recently been put out to bid, potentially offering a foothold to those contractors passed over for the bulk of the work apportioned over the past two years. Opportunities are opening for other companies hoping for a slice of the proceeds from Aramco’s ambitious offshore investment programme. Negotiations are under way to expand the LTA list and with a trio of larger projects launched this year likely to be offered beyond the current EPCI contractor pool.

The majority of the work tendered under Aramco’s long-standing programme of

offshore field maintenance relates to Safaniya – and the largest of the three packages currently awaiting award covers the sixth phase of the 37 billion barrel field’s ongoing redevelopment, which is aimed at preserving sustainable capacity at around 1.2-1.3 million bpd.

The largest of the four covers three gas production deck modules at the Hasbah and Arabiyah non-associated gas fields – which were brought on stream last year by Saipem as part of the kingdom’s landmark Wasit gas project. Such experience is presumed to put the Italian firm in a strong position, while the L&T-led JV is currently working on the expansion of Hasbah under a US$1.6 billion EPCI contract awarded in July last year.

The other three newly tendered contracts cover the replacement of a number of pipelines at Berri, re-routing of a pipeline at Safaniya and modifications to a water injection system at the Manifa field. n

A 6-cylinder in-line Wärtsilä 34DF engine

Edited by Ian Simm ians@newsbase.com

Wärtsilä dualfuel engines to power four new LNG Carriers The technology group Wärtsilä, through its joint venture company CSSC Wärtsilä Engine (Shanghai) Co (CWEC), has been contracted to deliver 16 engines for four new LNG carrier vessels being built at the Hudong Zhonghua shipyard in China. The order

Saudi Aramco’s Manifa Field developmen

NEWSBASE

was booked in August 2017.

Each of the four 174,000 m3 capacity vessels will be fitted with four Wärtsilä 34DF dual-fuel generating sets running primarily on LNG fuel to provide the ships with auxiliary power. Their total power output will be 56 MW. Among the reasons given for the Wärtsilä 34DF engine being chosen for these ships were its proven reliability, efficiency, and economic fuel consumption. Delivery of the engines to the yard will commence in the second

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half of 2018. The vessels are scheduled to be delivered commencing in 2019.

“This valuable order once again emphasises Wärtsilä’s leading position in gas and dual-fuel engine technology. We are pleased to be working on this project with the Hudong Zhonghua yard, a company with whom we have enjoyed a good relationship for some years. The order also confirms our growing presence in China and our ability to serve the Chinese market,” says Lars Anderson, Vice President, Engine Sales, Wärtsilä Marine Solutions. n WÄRTSILÄ

Transocean slashes drillship pricing for BHP TRANSOCEAN will provide its Deepwater Invictus ultra-deepwater drillship to BHP Billiton, the rig company said on October 17.

In order to secure the Gulf of Mexico work,

Transocean has cut the day rate by 75%.

The contract is worth US$106 million for the firm two-year commitment and there are another three one-year priced options. Work will begin in the second quarter of 2018.

The projected day rate under this contract is slightly over US$145,000 per day. The rig is currently under contract, with BHP, for US$592,000 per day. It had previously worked for BHP in Trinidad, for US$350,000 per day.

BHP has had the Deepwater Invictus since January of this year, with an estimated expiration date of November.

The US$592,000 day rate was the highest in Transocean’s book.

The Deepwater Conqueror is the next highest, at US$586,000 per day, under a deal with Chevron that will run to December 2021.

The Deepwater Invictus drilled the Wildling-2 well, and a sidetrack, completing in September. Both encountered oil in multiple horizons, BHP said. The Scimitar well was then spudded, with results expected in the March 2018 quarter, the company said.

Transocean’s president and CEO, Jeremy Thigpen, said the company was “extremely pleased” to continue working with the company in the Gulf. “Since we welcomed the Invictus into our fleet in 2014, the combination of BHP, Transocean and the Invictus has delivered industryleading performance; and we look forward to extending our productive relationship through this multi-year contract.”

A note from Tudor Pickering Holt described the contract as near cash breakeven for Transocean. The analysts said that this demonstrated that deepwater operators continued to hold all the leverage NEWSBASE

in such negotiations. It also noted that offshore drillers with small ultra-deepwater fleets “will likely find it challenging to keep their rigs gainfully employed moving forward, as larger rig contractors with geographic breadth, like [Transocean], have better staying power at these types of anaemic day rate levels”.

The same day Transocean announced the rig contract, the company said it had raised US$750 million in senior unsecured notes, due in 2026. The cash will go to retiring notes due in 2017 and 2018, in addition to paying off a loan from Norway’s partially state-owned Eksportfinans, which is due in January. n Edited By Anna Kachkova annak@newsbase.com

Contract award signals Iraq gas project revival THE troubled development of the Akkas gas field in unsettled western Iraq showed signs of renewed life in late September with the award of a contract to draw up a revised project design.

The acreage, auctioned seven years ago as the authorities belatedly became mindful of the potential to tap the county’s bountiful gas reserves, proved problematic from the outset owing to local opposition – and work was abandoned entirely in the wake of the Islamist militant invasion in mid-2014.

However, with Daesh largely defeated and with Baghdad’s upstream attention now increasingly focused on gas, the timing of the resumption is propitious – and several other such schemes have made recent progress.

UK firm Petrofac in late September announced the award by Seoul-owned Korea Gas Corp. (KOGAS) of a contract to modify the front-end engineering and design (FEED) study for the Nasiriya Gas Treatment Plant (GTP) at the Akkas field in Anbar Province.

Neither the value nor the duration of the job were revealed, but Petrofac said that the scope included the modification and application of an existing field development design to incorporate the GTP’s needs and the provision of a cost estimate for engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) work based on the revised plan. n Edited by Ian Simm ians@newsbase.com

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InnovOil

What next …?

To make enquiries about any of the products or technologies featured in this edition, use this list of vital connections

If Parker’s expertise in batteries and inverters could help make your power management more efficient, contact Dr David Blood via dblood@parker.com or visit www.parker.com For more information on super-low ice adhesion surfaces and the SLICE project to prevent ice formation, contact Prof. Zhiliang Zhang, NTNU via the project group’s website at www.ntnu.edu/nml/slice To learn more about Wood’s DeepRiser analysis tool, contact Director of Drilling Donogh Lang on +353 (0)91 48 1210, or email Donogh.Lang@woodplc.com If the shallow-water intervention capabilities of the GMS Evolution – or another SESV – could assist your shallow water project, contact GMS CEO Duncan Anderson Tel: +971 2 502 8808, or visit www.gmsuae.com To enquire as to whether Texo Drone’s UT thickness UAV is available for inspection of your asset, contact John Wood on +44 (0) 1224 531 321 or email john.wood@texodroneservices.co.uk ADIPEC 2017 will run from November 13-17 at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre.

To register, please visit www.visreg.adipec.com

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“We were pleased with the immediate interest that our on article Kongsberg attracted.”

“The article Oxford Catalysts Group Maritime’s Munin AUV is excellent”

Mark Hampton, Manager of Exploration and Technology, Shell Exploration and Production Inc. Published by

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