During drilling and well intervention (DWI) operations today operating limits are normally given as limiting wave height, and sometimes wave periods. The resulting diagrams are often not directly comparable with weather information received on the rig and the final decisions are often based on subjective assessment of wave height and period. The paper will present how BP, on the newly developed Skarv field in the Norwegian Sea, through thorough planning in the engineering phase has implemented a system where operating limits are specified based on directly measurable parameters such as rig heave and upper and lower flexjoint angles. How weather forecasting can be translated to give the rig crew direct forecasting of the limiting vessel or riser responses (e.g. flexjoint angles or heave), will also be presented. It will be shown how this allows for improved operational planning and support from onshore. Over the last years requirements for oil companies to be able to document the structural integrity of their subsea assets, including wells, has increased. On the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) there has been a particular focus on fatigue loading in the wellhead structure, including the upper sections of casing and conductor, due to loads induced by the riser and BOP during DWI operations. There have been cases where the design fatigue life of a wellhead system limits the number of days one can perform operations with a rig on a given well. This in term affects future oil recovery rates as the well fatigue life may not be sufficient to allow for side step drilling or intervention work required to maintain an optimal production from the well. The paper continues to present how BP on the Skarv field, stores and utilizes the measured lower flexjoint response to track and document well integrity. It will be demonstrated how the return on investment of a drilled well can be improved by documenting actual fatigue loading from each operation on a well compared to conservative design calculations. BP has addressed the above issues in a way that is likely to set a new standard for drilling and intervention operations in the North Sea in the future. 4Subsea AS has provided the engineering and instrumentation services that formed the basis for this paper.
Everyone is used to seeing graphs predicting unprecedented growth for the offshore wind industry over the next decades. Whether or not these ambitious goals are achieved remains to be seen, as it will require nothing less than an industrial revolution in offshore construction and installation. Never have such growth projections been backed by a global sense of urgency, but unfortunately, it is not just the growth challenge that has to be met and resolved. Data from insurance companies show a significant growth in financial losses in the offshore wind industry. For an expanding industry, an increase in insurance claims may be a result of the growth, however, even when normalizing the financial losses against industry CAPEX, number of turbines, or installed capacity, worrying trends are seen. For offshore wind to be a viable energy source in the future, the quality of design, installation and operation needs to improve significantly. Furthermore, the industry cannot continue to scale developments until it has overcome some serious reliability issues. In offshore wind, we have seen how an extreme focus on reducing CAPEX in projects has led to low-quality engineering and choice of sub-standard products that are not fit for long-term applications exposed to dynamic loading in marine environments. Standardization is needed, reflecting the best insight, experiences, methods, and tools. Although the challenges were never as extensive in oil and gas as in offshore wind today, the situation still resembles the quality and technology challenges faced by the offshore oil and gas industry some two decades ago. Many of the design challenges that have been overcome in oil and gas have been incorporated into codes, standards, and well-established engineering practices. Seen from a distance, the offshore wind industry experience similar trends. However, with the ongoing rapid growth, the learning and improvement processes need to be accelerated by leveraging the experiences from oil and gas. On the shoulders of a mature offshore industry and today's digital capabilities, standardization and up-scaling of offshore wind have better opportunities than oil & gas had 25 years ago. However, to leverage this opportunity a true life-of-field approach is required.
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