Despite the ongoing green shift, the oil and gas industry will still be a major energy provider during the next decades. Nonetheless, the industry must address climate change and declining oil prices by reducing carbon emissions and costs related to field development.
As offshore oil and gas industry moves to marginal and deep-water fields, subsea production systems (SPS) have become the norm to overcome technical and economic challenges. A SPS consists of completed wells with seabed wellhead, subsea Xmas trees, tie-ins to a flowline system, and equipment for production, processing and control. It can range in complexity from a satellite well to several wells connected to a manifold.
The overall footprint and costs of a SPS are associated with manufacture, handling, and installation of individual components, and the resources needed to operate, monitor, and maintain the system.
Deep-water SPSs already present low energy consumption/carbon emissions per barrel produced, yet improvements are feasible. The solution envelope for a SPS is restricted by industry guidelines and practices, but ongoing technological developments make it possible to challenge practices and rethink the solutions applied to subsea field development.
The concept of Technology Readiness Level (TRL) is used by the oil and gas industry to characterize the status of new technologies. TRL 0 refers to unproven concept stage while TRL 7 refers to field proven technology. This research aims to use recent technological developments (TRL 3 to 7) to generate new design concepts up to TRL 1 (proven concept), which could be further developed together with industry partners.