The continuous drive to increase oil and gas production requires fields to be developed under challenging circumstances such as deeper water, harsh operating & environmental conditions and remote areas all while adhering to strict HSE requirements. At the same time, investment decisions for an increasing number of projects have been postponed because the increasing costs have resulted in reduced shareholders return. In order to overcome the technical challenges within the changing environment, funding needs to be created by improving the cost effectiveness of the adopted solutions. This can be achieved by optimizing and standardizing the current concepts and by using the research in and outside our industry, to benefit from innovations, which can reduce risks and save costs. At the same time, lessons captured in the past decade need to be imbedded within the organizations which requires retaining, training and guidance of the engineers and building on the technical relations within the supply chain. The other side of the deep-water challenge is the current technical limitations, which need to be overcome. Equipment that is currently available and their applications need to be revised to deliver the step change to the ultra-deep water. This paper will focus on the areas, which combine our extensive installation experience with our more recently gained SURF EPCI insights and the ongoing technology developments with the intent to create practical solutions for the industry. It will describe how we intend to use real time simulators to identify and manage risks during the offshore construction. Also, topics such as lowering capabilities for the ultra-deep water, flexibility in field developments, smart design which incorporates vessel capabilities, coating & welding developments for the high pressure, high temperature fields and the implications of remote areas will be addressed.
Offshore pipe-in-pipe systems require high performance thermal insulation to maintain high fluid temperature at arrival and to avoid hydrate formation during the cool-down process that follows a pipeline shut-down. At field joints, it might be difficult to achieve the design insulation performance due to installation challenges. In these cases, the insulation layer partially fills the gap between the inner and outer pipes and thus “cold spots” could potentially arise at field joints during the pipeline operation and cool-down. In this paper the impact on the thermal performance of partially insulated pipe-in-pipe field joints is evaluated through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Thermal convection is included in the fluid model for the pipe content and the air gap between the inner and outer pipes. Comparison is also made between the numerical analysis and simplified lumped-parameter models. Results from numerical simulations show that for the case considered no cold spot arises due to a lack of field joint insulation and length-averaged Overall Heat Transfer Coefficient (OHTC) can be used to predict the pipeline cool-down time. Numerical predictions have been compared to simulated service test results, which confirm the length-averaging effect on the OHTC. Further studies are recommended to assess potential cost savings that could be achieved for uninsulated field joints.
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