For decades, technology development in the marine oil and gas industry has focused on accessing reserves in ever more challenging locations -the Arctic, West of Shetland, in deep waters, in high pressure and high temperature reservoirs and so on. While this trend will certainly continue, economic and environmental concerns, and technology progress are driving efforts to maximize oil recovery, reduce operating and capital expenditure, simplify access and intervention, and extend field life. At the vanguard of this change are advanced subsea systems. Subsea technology has been around for a few decades, but the mission of oil companies is now to put an entire subsea ЉfactoryЉ on the sea floor, with no facilities topside. The technical challenges presented by this quest are formidable, but the payoff is enormous.Title photo text: Locating oil and gas recovery and processing equipment on the seabed and eliminating topside facilities entirely has many advantages. What technology is needed to accomplish it? Shown is a concept for a subsea power hub and distribution.In terms of capital investment, the marine oil and gas industry is one of the top-spending industries in the world. In 2016, global exploration and production expenditure (capex and opex) is expected to be around $465 billion [1].However, oil and gas infrastructure costs money. Usually, subsea wells route a mixture of oil, gas and water to a nearby surface facility, where the mixture is separated into its constituent parts -and the water is often returned to the seabed and re-injected into the rock formations whence it came in order to maintain reservoir pressure. The oil and gas are sent on to the next facility -perhaps hundreds of kilometers distant. The cost of the infrastructure required simply to move these substances around runs into billions of dollars for a medium-sized field.If, however, a good part of the processing -for example, the oil/gas/water separation or gas compression -can be done Љat source,Љ ie, on the seabed, then much of this infrastructure becomes unnecessary. Indeed, if all the facilities can be placed on the seabed, then the requirement for ЉlocalЉ topside facilities vanishes altogether and along with it a huge capex and opex cost /(pic 1). Further, water depth then becomes less relevant and it becomes easier to exploit resources in deep water locations. Not only that but because the surface facilities that remain will be shared by many satellite fields, better utilization can be achieved.
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