Standardisation in subsea developments met with enthusiasm
Posted: 24 April 2006
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More than 50 oil and gas industry subsea professionals gathered in Aberdeen recently for the world’s first demonstration of newly-developed interface standardisation between intelligent wells and subsea systems (IWIS) for the global oil and gas industry.
Over 50 subsea professionals from three continents saw a major leap forward in standardisation that will benefit companies in the subsea industry right around the world – representatives from Brazil, Norway, France, Italy, UK, USA, Germany and Canada were impressed with the success of the demonstration.
 Paul Johnson (Picture), associate director at OTM, an independent firm of technology management consultants speci alising in upstream oil and gas, said: “Traditionally, a large number of customised subsea interfaces – control cards and software - have been developed for different devices and by different suppliers. This has required testing and qu alification of each interface, imposing costs, logistical limitations, lack of flexibility and concerns around project efficiency and long lead times.”
Sponsored by BP, Chevron, ENI, Petrobras, Statoil and Total, the IWIS group has worked unstintingly for a decade towards a global Intelligent Well Interface Standard that will simplify and reduce costs for companies involved in subsea developments. Managed by OTM, the IWIS JIP has brought together instrumentation speci alists and controls systems suppliers to achieve a common interface.
Speaking for the IWIS Steering Group, David Saul of BP said, “The JIP members have been working to standardise the major parameters of customised subsea interfaces so that performance and reliability can be improved and individual project and vendor specific interfacing solutions reduced.”
The interface cards developed by the IWIS JIP have been tested over the past three months and the first public demonstrations of the new standard interfaces were hosted by Aker Kvaerner in Aberdeen.
Johnson added: “Such collaborative projects are fairly unique to the global oil and gas industry. They require a high degree of independent neutral facilitation to reach agreement for world class standards. The IWIS group are all delighted with this achievement and are impressed with the simplicity of swapping over various equipment manufacturers’ interface cards, an operation that was simply not possible.’
An oil and gas operator will now be able to specify the IWIS standard and any control systems that are used will be compatible. This will give subsea contractors a wider range of equipment vendors to choose from, once they all sign up to the same standard, and it will speed up the development process as subsea interfaces will be simpler to manage.
For IWIS to succeed, members from around the world have contributed in-house expertise and money, for the benefit of the whole industry - as there are shared needs and different types of valuable expertise available in the member across the subsea sector.
“The global subsea industry is currently worth around £5 billion annually. This is set to grow to £10bn over the next 5 years. Successful and continued production of oil and gas depends on cost-effective and flexible ways to extract oil, and joint projects like IWIS mean everybody gains” Johnson said.
Subsea system vendors involved in the JIP are Aker Kvaerner, Cameron, Dril-Quip, FMC Technologies and Vetco. Downhole vendors involved are PROMORE, Roxar, Schlumberger, Weatherford, WellDynamics – Permanent Monitoring and WellDynamics – SmartWell Control.
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