Two years in the making, Aker Solutions and Baker Hughes’ subsea production alliance was rubber-stamped by the regulatory authorities last week.
The alliance, which brings together two companies that might not be seen as natural bed-fellows, is on a mission to develop technology for production solutions designed to boost output, increase recovery rates, and reduce costs for subsea fields, according to the two firms.
Image: The Asgard subsea template, manufactured by Aker Solutions.
The meeting of minds is already proving fruitful, according to the two senior company executives tasked with leading the alliance. They spoke about the new found alliance at ONS in Stavanger. Brage Johannessen, vice president and general manager, Baker Hughes, and Svenn Ivar Fure, senior vice president, Aker Solutions, set out why the subsea production alliance had been formed and revealed a new technology idea, which could be its first success story.
At the core of the subsea production alliance is addressing some of the cost concerns that were high on the agenda during ONS, as well as addressing falling production rates through collaborating and introducing new technologies. “The most meaningful way to reduce cost is addressing entire production system,” Johannessen said.
Svenn Ivar Fure, Aker Solutions, agreed: “So what is stopping us doing this? We have become an established industry, with career paths, silos, functions, where ways of doing things and every company does things slightly differently. This isn’t the way to improve an entire system."
Johannessen added: "We, as an industry, need to simplify the way we work and adapt new technology and work processes in an effective but more efficient manner. Worker smarter… with an open dialogue across industry. We want to reduce costs and increase production. If you take into consideration the time component, reduce costs, increase production and make is last for a long time, then you get recovery."
He continued: “We are going deeper, into more remote and harsher environments. Whether that is metocean challenges in the Arctic or sub-surface challenges with high-pressure, high-temperature or more complex reservoirs or a combination of these. With, in the short, term industry not finding more (fewer exploration successes), cost efficient solutions for increasing or sustaining production and a longer-term goal of improved recovery is why the two companies came together.”
Talks to form an alliance started about two years ago, Johannessen said, noting: “We are convinced the only way to meet this challenge head on is collaboration across traditional industry segments and boundaries. Combining Baker Hughes’ artificial life and completion technologies with Aker Solutions’ subsea production systems, coupled with joint knowledge in subsea intervention, you can provide a horizontally integrated service… from the reservoir through the interface of the Xmas tree to production facilities.”
He said the initial focus of the alliance will be well performance, boosting, power and control, combined integrated control and power systems, and seabed boosting.
“Up to now seabed boosting has been using larger pumps, typically offshore west Africa with 150,000b/d floating production systems,” Johannessen said. “For the smaller fields, there hasn’t been any cost efficient tools on the boosting side. We have seen some innovation here and there, but so far, for small individual wells, at 3-4000b/d, there hasn’t bene any good tools. Our engineers came up with the power jump flowline booster, which uses existing field infrastructure.
"A Baker Hughes’ electrical submersible pump goes inside the well jumper that connects the tree and the manifold. Then you put the system around it so it can work in this context and as a single well booster. It is relatively small, relatively flexible and uses the existing infrastructure. It would be possible to install with small vessels and offers 80-90-day pay back. We looked at how many fields could use this idea and it came to a very large number, which surprised us. These fields are everywhere because they are the longer step outs or where the production is below a certain threshold.
"Neither Aker Solutions nor Baker Hughes could have come up with this idea on their own.”
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