Dutch and Norwegian project E! 3040 SUBSEA SEPARATOR has been presented with this years EUREKA Lillehammer Award for its outstanding environmental benefits. The award was handed over by Mr Einar BULL, Norwegian ambassador to Italy, at EUREKAs High Level Group gala dinner in Rome. This compact subsea processing equipment will ensure a better use of increasingly scarce resources and is set to improve the economics of offshore oil and gas production. The outcome has resulted in the worlds first subsea separating system for oil, water and sand. Supplied by FMC Technologies, it is to be installed in the Norwegian Statoil Tordis field in the North Sea in the third quarter of 2007. The technology was developed by Dutch project leader CDS Engineering in cooperation with partners Statoil and FMC Technologies.
By using this technology, you can exploit an oilfield much deeper so, for instance, you can recover five to 10% more from the original reserves, an enormous advantage, explains Toine Hendriks, CDS Engineerings senior process engineer. It is also expected that this technology will facilitate new oil field developments in deeper and more remote areas, an advantage for the future as most of the easy accessible oil has already been produced. CDS, which is now an FMC Technologies subsidiary, was a small company and this was an expensive project as we literally had to build a 1:1 scale separator in our test lab. Without EUREKA, funding the project would have been difficult, he added.
Separation equipment plays a crucial role in the oil and gas production process by splitting the wellstream, which may comprise of oil, gas, water and sand, into individual constituents.By installing a full field subsea separation facility, Statoil expects to improve the Tordis fields recovery factor from 49 to 55%, explains Rune Mode Ramberg, Statoils subsea processing discipline adviser. Along with other upgrades to the field, the separation system will allow Statoil to
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Contact: Sally Horspool
sally.horspool@es.eureka.be
32-277-70963
EUREKA
18-Jun-2007