Remoter and remoter: why data capture and processing must move subsea

“Our interim vision is to move all topside processing subsea,” says FMC Technologies.

Economic and manpower constraints plus the increasing remoteness of available hydrocarbons mean the offshore oil and gas industry should follow NASA’s lead in technological development, an expert has urged.
But instead of outer space, the frontier for expanding our control through remote surveillance and data processing is subsea, where the current lack of visibility has serious short-term implications, said FMC Technologies’ Torgrim Aas.

In a paper published this week by DecomWorld, Mr Aas, a condition and performance monitoring (CPM) specialist with FMC, said that a “mind and the technology shift” was necessary if the industry is to continue extracting hydrocarbons safely and profitably.

He called for much more robust use of subsea sensors and data processing capability underwater to monitor not just hydrocarbon production, but also production support systems, including sensor power consumption and communication status, internal statuses on micro-controllers and CPUs, and temperature and pressure sensors inside the control system itself.

“To put it another way, we need to watch the watchers,” Mr Aas said.

He added that the huge amount of data generated by this new remote sensing capability must be processed and made accessible to maintenance and production engineers onshore so they can intervene before an incident takes place.

The paper includes a case study of a CPM system installed on an operator’s field in the North Sea.

FMC says the system detected problems before the operator would normally have noticed them. In one instance a small leakage caused a slight pressure increase that was detected three months ahead of when the leakage would likely have caused a malfunction.

“Our interim vision, developed with the most forward looking operators, is to move all topside processing subsea,” said Mr Aas.

He said: “Operations are getting remoter, the environment is becoming more extreme, systems and infrastructure are getting more complex, and direct human involvement is on the wane.”

The cost benefits of what he called an “information-rich, pre-emptive approach to subsea control” are difficult to quantify, but only because control incidents are by definition unpredictable.

“You cannot budget for them,” he said. “Their consequences can fall anywhere on a vast spectrum, from a few hours of downtime to a catastrophe that inflicts heavy damage on the environment, on human welfare and on a company’s balance sheet, reputation and share price.”

Click here to download the paper, “The future of surveillance is subsea”.

Send your news to Rod Sweet