Marine Log - July 2008 - (Page G8)

GULF COAST HEADLINER Perdido spar continued from p. G4 The Clyde Boudreaux is expected to remain at Perdido until around the turn of the decade, working even after the spar is installed. The Clyde Boudreaux can house up to 200 people, with hull dimensions of 271 ft x 228 ft. Three fields, Great White, Silvertip and Tobago, will be developed via the Perdido spar, which is jointly owned by Shell (35%), Chevron (37.5%) and BP (27.5%) NEW TECHNOLOGY Accomplishing this record-breaking feat will require cutting-edge technology and engineering. Two major technologies are playing a key role in the field’s development. This will be the first application of full host scale subsea separating and boosting, which enables improved recovery by removing about 2,000 psi of back pressure from the wells. “Perdido has low-energy reservoirs, with low temperatures and pressure, so we have to separate liquids and gas at the seafloor and then pump it to the surface. Without developing the technology to do this, we simply couldn’t reliably produce the fields,” Perdido Project Manaer Dale Snyder says. It will be the first application of wet tree direct vertical access (DVA) wells from a spar. Using a DVA configuration allows a larger number of subsea completions to be accessed by the facility’s rig drilling, resulting in significant savings in the drilling and completions programs for these wells. The wet tree DVA system will use a single high pressure drilling and completion riser suspended from the host to access 22 subsea trees directly below the host. The configuration will allow the use of a surface blow-out preventer (BOP) for the drilling, completion and later sidetracking of wells. By utilizing a single well slot for accessing the wells beneath the host, the size and cost of the host can be reduced without limiting well count flexibility, which is important given the increasing subsurface challenges in a maturing deepwater environment. “Basically, the DVA allows us to have a large number of wells needed to develop this field,” Snyder notes. “With more traditional DVA systems, we would be looking at significantly greater space requirements on the topsides to accommodate the wells system. The advantage of the wet tree DVA is that it reduces the space required and, therefore, the cost impacts from the wells system,” says Rome Gonazlez, Wells team lead. Incorporation of newly developed procedures for drilling and completing wells with a surface BOP and installing subsea trees will be the key to efficient operations from the fit-for-purpose platform drill rig. ML G8 MARINE LOG JULY 2008 www.marinelog.com http://www.seaark.com http://www.seaark.com http://www.marinelog.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Marine Log - July 2008

Marine Log - July 2008 Contents Editorial Second Thoughts Update Inside Washington Coastal Shipping Communications Paints & Coatings WISTA’s Jeanne Grasso Showcase Newsmakers Tech News Contracts Events Website Directory ML Buyer's Guide ML Marketplace Tech Talk Gulf Coast Headliner

Marine Log - July 2008

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