GMC & ITP-Interpipe to Co-Present at OPT 2017

GMC Limited and ITP-Interpipe will join forces at next year’s Offshore Pipeline Technology conference as they co-present the following paper on reducing SURF costs:

Reducing SURF Costs by 30% – How to rethink the installation of pipe-in-pipe; no more offshore welding with mechanical connectors. 

Authors:
ITP InTerPipe:
Christian Geertsen, Ph.D., R&D Director
Wayne Grobbelaar, Head of Business Development
Christophe Paillusseau, Senior Business Development Consultant
GMC Limited:
Phil Jones, General Manager

The current upstream market has now been marked by two years of slow down. Operators have clearly indicated total cost of ownership was to be reduced by 30, or even 40%, to envisage a resumption of investments, which have reached a six year low at 400 Billion USD per annum. 

As new developments arise, typically accompanied with more severe challenges in terms of depth or flow assurance, the market is to rethink development methodologies. In that view, ITP and GMC came up with an innovative design for deepwater subsea applications capable to offer a true game–changer in terms of economics, time to first oil and business model. 

For a typical 30-40km subsea field layout in deepwater western Africa, the offshore installation is usually the main cost driver and the biggest risk. The efficient design offers to reduce total cost of ownership from the operator’s perspective by 30-40% and reduce risk taking, as well as increase onshore local content. The combination of GMC’s mechanical connectors with ITP’s high-strength field joint provides an ideal case to combine high thermal efficiency, mechanical strength, and short offshore installation campaigns. 

This paper will describe how the offshore J-lay installation cycle times can be reduced to 10mn (60%+ improvement compared to today), remove any offshore welding activity, and therefore, dramatically reduce risk and improve safety (less people onboard), and, increase local content by adding more value during the onshore pre-fabrication. 

In addition, this paper will also discuss how to reduce time-to-first-oil by allowing standardization in the long run of Pipe-in-Pipe designs for certain water depths; including details of the state-of-the-art mechanical connectors (which are at the heart of this disruptive solution) and benchmark with other industries where process quality control is prevailing, rather than product quality control. 

To find out more about OPT 2017, or to register, click here.