1. BACKGROUND FOR THE PROJECT/ WHY ARE WE DOING THIS RESEARCH?

Worldwide, the oil and gas industry has the ambition to expand the use of subsea processing in existing and future fields, as it has found that in order to reduce environmental footprint and increase profits, surface facilities must be kept to a minimum or eliminated. This ambition impacts offshore field development decisions, which are complex, based on uncertain data, and involve multibillion-dollar investments and human resources, especially when employing relatively new technologies such as subsea processing. A crucial task in field development is to design the subsea field layout, which is directly linked to well productivity, ultimate recovery, flow assurance, and capital and operating costs. To improve field layout while considering uncertainties, we propose to develop robust stochastic methods for field layout optimization with subsea processing.

2. WHAT I HAVE DONE

To achieve this goal, a thorough literature review will be conducted, along consulting with our industry partners to determine an effective and practical approach to the problem. Methods and results of previous research within SUBPRO will also be taken into account. Extensive work will be performed to: • Develop a methodology to early plan the use of subsea processing equipment and its deployment schedule Optimization of subsea systems with processing equipment Developing better methods for early planning of subsea systems with subsea processing. in order to maximize system performance and reduce cost. • Define the number of wells and their flow rate in an optimum manner considering economic, operational and reservoir uncertainties and constraints. • Study, analyze and consider key performance indicators (KPIs) used in subsea systems, such as availability, reliability, hydrocarbon production, and environment-related indicators.

3. MAIN RESULTS AND HOW CAN THEY POSSIBLY BE USED BY THE INDUSTRY

We expect to obtain a subsea layout optimization model that enables an objective comparison of alternatives and provides a more scientific, quantitative and probabilistic approach for the subsea layout problem. This manner, the industry can benefit from a more standardized and streamlined approach for subsea layout, while redirecting thousands of working hours saved due to the automation of subsea layout procedure to more engineer-intensive tasks. Besides, the optimization of the subsea layout may obtain solutions with a higher NPV and reduced environmental footprint, otherwise overlooked by other methods. As the proposed model will be a series of objective procedures, it can easily be modified in the future to accommodate new challenges, improve the understanding and modelling of specific issues, or serve as a baseline for analogous problems.