The merger of Baker Hughes and GE Oil & Gas brought together established competencies in a breadth of disciplines. The newly formed entity is drawing on depth of knowledge and experience to develop subsea trees and control systems that are moving back the boundaries of what is possible in deepwater operations.

Fullstream ahead

Describing itself as the world’s first and only “fullstream” company, Baker Hughes, a GE company (BHGE), has set the goal of enabling smarter ways to produce energy.

According to John Kerr, BHGE vice president and CTO for oilfield equipment, “Fullstream is an offering for delivering solutions from the birth of the well through to decommissioning.” This encompasses “well design and planning, reservoir engineering and completion design, and installation that then connects into the traditional business of oil and gas.”

This approach also considers how the elements that make up a development program contribute to helping operators from concept selection to full-field installation to life-of-field management.

“It introduces different commercial terms, different financial engagement terms and a different mindset of how we engage the end user,” Kerr said, adding that success is apparent in the positive way his company is working with clients.

An example is the award of the Siccar Point Energy (SPE) Cambo Field project northwest of the Shetland Islands in the U.K. North Sea.

BHGE has been selected as the exclusive supplier to support the appraisal and early production phases of the project, with the opportunity to extend into the full field development. The scope of supply draws on the company’s integrated portfolio of solutions, including a suite of well services solutions for the appraisal well, and expansion to provide the production and installation of subsea production equipment and flexible pipes for the early development phase.

According to SPE, this agreement represents an innovative alliance based on collaboration aimed at reshaping traditional relationships between suppliers and operators in favor of a long-term partnership that minimizes tendering costs, improves execution and risk mitigation, and incentivizes performance by creating shared project objectives.

Enhancing productivity

As important as BHGE’s fullstream capabilities is its focus on enhancing productivity and operating efficiency, areas that offer significant opportunity for improvement as the oil and gas industry seeks to become more viable in the long term.

Dean Arnison, BHGE global product leader for subsea systems, provided the company’s Brilliant Factories initiative as an example. The goal is to optimize manufacturing by linking design, engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, distribution and services in one system.

“We’re not just selling digital solutions to our customers to reduce costs,” Arnison said. “We are doing it ourselves as proof of the pudding. How do we automate this? How can we use digital solutions to improve the way we do that? That is the essence of Brilliant Factories. It’s about making ourselves more efficient internally, which is equally beneficial to our customers.”

One simple example of how the company has leveraged Brilliant Factories is in the way it has automated the application of corrosion-resistant coating to subsea components. Much of this equipment is clad with Inconel, an alloy of nickel containing chromium and iron, which is corrosion-resistant at high temperatures. BHGE’s new manufacturing techniques allow the coating to be applied more quickly and efficiently with fewer defects, improvements that are invisible to the end user but increase the speed with which components can be made ready for installation.

New offerings

BHGE also is impacting operations in more traditional ways by introducing new products. One of these is a largebore subsea tree system designed with component reliability, production availability and the cost of overall system maintenance in mind. According to Arnison, this system is built on expertise gained through developing the existing 7-in. valve-based horizontal and vertical technology solutions.

“When dealing with the challenges of large-bore gas production, large-bore valving and the associated challenges introduced by 3,000 m (10,000 ft) water depth, you end up with sizable structures and associated weights,” Kerr said, adding that technical challenges like these are the impetus for developing better designs.

The BHGE approach was to look for modularity opportunities within the trees themselves. “We’ve effectively split the tree into two,” Arnison said. “The tree has a lift cap on top that can be designed to be a flow control module with a typical choke and flowmeter, or as a HIPPS [high-integrity pressure protection system] cap for starting up a high-pressure well, that can be removed later and replaced with a production cap that in turn can be replaced at a later time with a booster pump.”

“Because of the design concept surrounding our Modular Compact Pump, we can package even better performance than what is available at present in a smaller format that allows it to be considered in a very practical way as a component of a tree-mounted option,” Kerr said.

The new vertical tree is 40% lighter, which means it can be manufactured more economically than traditional trees and can be installed using a smaller support-type vessel.

BHGE has built its expertise in large-bore, long-offset gas fields across a number of projects in the Asia-Pacific, Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa regions, with earlier versions of the 7-in. tree qualified for 3,000 m (10,000 ft) water depth and temperatures ranging from 168 C (334 F) to -46 C (-52 F).

“This is a huge qualification envelope that our products can operate in,” Arnison said. The company also has collaborated with Eni on the development of a standard subsea tree, the e-EHXT. “This is a great example of our industry embracing standardization,” Arnison said. “In this case the customer standardized their own predesign, which helps us deliver to them in a faster cycle and makes execution more straightforward.”

The e-EHXT tree will be deployed for the first time on the Eni-operated Zohr Field in the Mediterranean Sea offshore Egypt, where BHGE is providing project management, engineering procurement, fabrication, construction, testing and transportation of a subsea production system, along with support for installation, commissioning and startup.

Taking the next step

“We have had a huge focus over the last 18 months to two years on rationalization and standardization of the product offerings,” Arnison said. “We are minimizing the number of variants and maximizing the opportunity to deploy the system in more applications.”

“The industry is speaking very loudly as to what they require,” Kerr added, “and what they require is not necessarily a solution delivered where we address just one component like cost, but something that takes into account the whole-life cost of ownership, going beyond hardware and installation.”

By taking a broader view and thinking more creatively, it is possible to find better solutions. “The efficiency gains for both parties are first class,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Comments