American Oil and Gas Reporter - June 2017 - 54

SpecialReport: Offshore & Subsea
equipment to be installed by more potential vessels, thereby
lowering installation rates. Both the SURF and subsea equipment
supplier give up something in terms of revenue, but not
necessarily profitability, significantly decreasing the overall
project cost.
Moreover, getting lean with subsea infrastructure is leading
to more equipment being machined instead of welded, reducing
manufacturing time and cost. At the same time, total part counts
continue to shrink, reducing the number of possible leak paths.
Even as lean principles dramatically reduce subsea equipment
cost, improved instrumentation technologies such as acoustic
monitoring, along with the smaller part counts, significantly
improve the condition surveillance capabilities for the quantity
of equipment employed.
Taking The Next Step

Most offshore operators now take it upon themselves to
ensure that integrity management and a condition monitoring
system are in place when a field is commissioned. In fact, all
new subsea fields being developed today include a data collector
or historian that contains a database of the field parameters that
are important for condition monitoring.
FIGURE 1
Subsea Helicoaxial Pump
With Integrated Condition Monitoring Capabilities

The final step is to implement condition monitoring as a
standard for subsea equipment. Vehicles, airplanes, laptops,
cell phones and even many household appliances now have
some degree of built-in instrumentation and monitoring. These
capabilities are not for operational control, but for monitoring
the condition of the equipment and providing indications of its
usage. Laptops and phones contain multiple water sensors to
indicate whether a device has gotten wet or liquid has been
spilled on it. Cars provide warnings when brake pads wear out
either by an audible alert or through the use of a proximity
sensor indicating inadequate pad thickness on the driver information center.
The American Petroleum Institute is working to mandate accumulated fatigue monitoring through a working group and
recommended practice. Det Norske Veritas has issued a recommended practice along the same lines (DNVGL-RP-0142). Ultimately, both groups intend to formalize a requirement for
equipment suppliers to:
* Understand how their equipment wears out or can fail;
* Put in place an instrumentation strategy that monitors
those usage conditions;
* Employ a system that keeps a running record of accumulated
fatigue for critical equipment; and
* Provide advance notification when equipment nears the
end of its useful life.
Again borrowing from the automotive industry, consider the
strides made in cars and trucks during the past decades. Engine
sizes are comparably sized or smaller, yet power levels are
higher, emissions are drastically lower, fuel efficiency is much
better, reliability is vastly improved and costs on an inflationadjusted basis are lower. A similar transformation can be
expected in the subsea equipment space once the industry fully
closes the loop on embracing engineering feedback with regard
to the ways in which subsea equipment is ordered, designed
and operated.
To complete this transformation, operators need to expect
equipment to be built with life cycle monitoring capability integrated into the design. Equipment suppliers must continue the
journey of reducing equipment cost, improving operational
designs and optimizing systems for use.
Next-Generation Subsea Pump

To date, most subsea equipment has been deployed with an
instrumentation suite optimized to control a particular piece of
equipment with little upfront consideration for how best to
monitor and manage integrity over its life cycle. However,
subsea pumping systems are now available with comprehensive
top-down capabilities to predict equipment failures from modal
analyses, and vibration sensors and other advanced instrumentation
are being designed specifically to monitor equipment condition.
One glimpse of the future in subsea equipment is represented
by a next-generation subsea helicoaxial pump that was qualified
with condition and performance monitoring as an integral part
54 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER

American Oil and Gas Reporter - June 2017

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