The hunt for black gold
Deeper wells and renewed safety concerns pose new
challenges for the offshore oil and gas industry. Providing solutions offers
both opportunities and rewards.
Despite moves toward greater energy
efficiency and a turbulent economic climate, global demand for oil and gas shows
no sign of letting up. Consumption in the developed world may be flatlining, but
China will more than double its oil consumption from 2000 to 2015, while in
India demand will increase by about 75 percent.
Debate continues about when
“peak oil” will be reached, but the fact remains that a huge amount of oil is
still in the ground – enough to last several decades by most estimates. The
problem is that much of the “easy” oil has been found, and demand for energy is
taking exploration and production to ever-tougher extremes of geography and
climate. The deepwater (more than 500 meters or 1,600 feet) and ultra-deepwater
(more than 1,500 meters or about 5,000 feet) energy sector represents one of the
major growth areas for the oil and gas industry, but exploiting these reserves
presents tough technical challenges.
“This is a very onerous
environment,” says John Drury, Business Group Director for Trelleborg’s business
that focuses on the offshore industry. “The risks multiply exponentially with
depth, and operators are looking for fail-safe solutions.”
One issue with
ever-deeper wells is that the hot oil cools and thickens on its way to the
surface, slowing the flow and potentially causing blockages. One of Trelleborg’s
many product lines for the oil and gas industry is thermal insulation material
to prevent this cooling.
“Our materials are engineered to cope with
environments at extreme depth plus temperatures well in excess of 100°C
[212°F],” says Drury.
Safety has long been a priority for the offshore
oil and gas industry, but the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico,
which resulted in 11 deaths and the largest accidental oil spill in history,
thrust the issue into the spotlight.
“Operators are introducing increased
risk-mitigation strategies to avoid these sorts of incidents in the future,”
says Drury. “There should be further opportunities for our safety-related
products as legislation is introduced.”
Among Trelleborg’s wide range of
safety systems for the offshore oil and gas industry are the Elastopipe deluge
system for fire protection, microspheres for smothering fires and flexible
fire-retardant coatings. Trelleborg is also working on innovative buoyancy
solutions that improve safety by reducing the load on the long pipes bringing
oil up more than a kilometer (3,000 feet) from the seabed.
The industry,
which accounts for about 10 percent of Trelleborg’s total sales, has witnessed
increased globalization in recent years as new deepwater fields are exploited,
such as off the coast of Vietnam, Brazil and West Africa.
“In Brazil there
is heavy investment to enable the construction of ships in the country, whereas
historically they might have been built in Korea,” says Drury. “Similarly in
Southeast Asia there is a shift toward deeper waters, and at the same time
countries in the region are looking to develop more locally based supply
chains.”
To capture these opportunities, suppliers including Trelleborg are
setting up production in these new markets.
But while the opportunities are
plentiful, the competition is tougher than ever.
“There are a lot of
building projects ongoing, but people are being very aggressive to win and
everyone is very conscious about margins,” says Thor Hegg Eriksen, Business Unit
President for Trelleborg’s business that focuses on the offshore industry. “This
seems a bit of an anomaly for a business that is making so much money on the
operator side. But there is not really a direct competitor that is able to offer
such a broad product portfolio from as many locations as
Trelleborg.”
Industry observers see an intriguing period ahead, with expected
regulatory changes on safety, national oil companies becoming more outward
looking, the rise of Asia as a supplier and consumer, and increased investment
in deepwater drilling.
“There are changes going on, and it is an interesting
environment,” says Eriksen. “But with our core competencies, our ability to work
on a global scale and our extensive innovation work, Trelleborg is well
positioned to see what happens and to jump on the opportunities as they arise.”
On the rise
With the deepwater discoveries off its Atlantic coast
representing a third of all worldwide oil discoveries in the past five years,
Brazil is widely touted as the next oil giant. Petrobras, which has grown to
become the world’s third-largest oil and gas company by market capitalization,
will be investing some USD 224 billion by 2014, much of it in platforms, rigs
and other infrastructure.
To supply this booming market, Trelleborg is
investing heavily in Brazil, acquiring an existing factory and building another
on a greenfield site. “Brazil is becoming hugely important,” says Brian
McSharry, President of Trelleborg’s U.S. business that focuses on the offshore
industry. “We have studied the market conditions and recognized the significant
potential, and as a result we have established a major presence there.”
The
new facility, located in Brazil’s oil capital, Macaé, will manufacture a wide
range of polymer-based solutions for offshore topside and subsea oil and gas
exploration.
“There is no other manufacturing on this scale in the country,”
says McSharry. “We will be able to reach near capacity relatively quickly, and
the size of the facility is such that if we need to expand, we can.”
The
second factory, at Santana de Parnaiba, was acquired in April 2011, together
with a nipple hose technology for transferring oil from floating production,
storage and offloading vessels and terminals.
“This product completes
our product and solution portfolio,” says Managing Director Xavier-Alexandre
Delineau. Another line at the factory will produce printing blankets to cater to
the growing Latin American printing market.
Petrobras has set aggressive
objectives on local content for its projects, so the factories are important
for Trelleborg to access Brazil’s oil and gas market. “One of our goals is to
have two world-class factories serving the global offshore and marine
offloading business, and we have a plan in place to sustain and develop our
leadership position,” Delineau says.
Avoiding explosive decompression
failure
When engineers specify a seal material for an application, they have
to consider such things as working temperatures, pressure and compatibility with
chemicals. In oil and gas applications there are other critical criteria that
must be considered, such as explosive decompression.
Inherently, elastomer
seals contain voids. Gas or gas mixtures in contact with elastomer surfaces
during oil and gas processing are absorbed and saturate elastomer seals. At high
pressure this absorbed gas is in a compressed state. When external system
pressure is reduced, either rapidly or over a relatively short period of time,
the compressed gas nucleates, inflating at the voids within the elastomer.
Depending on the strength and hardness of the elastomer, this can cause the
elastomer to break or crack.
No elastomer can be completely ED resistant.
However, Trelleborg has engineered the XploR™ range of sealing materials that
demonstrates unrivaled ED resistance for each elastomer type.
An
Innovative system
Trelleborg has developed a new stackable version of its
innovative RiserGuard® system that provides a solution for rigs with limited
storage space while offering the same high protection as the original
system.
“We originally developed our RiserGuard product to help protect bare
riser joints as they were handled and run on the rig,” says Alan McBride, Vice
President of Drilling at Trelleborg’s business that focuses on the offshore
industry. “In addition, the product would enable the riser to be run and pulled
quicker, saving valuable rig time.”
The new joints can be stacked alongside
buoyant riser joints in the same deck storage area, thanks to strategically
placed protective sections spaced within the RiserGuard that transfer loads
between the joints and the deck.
“Always keen to meet the changing wants and
needs of our customers, we recognized the need to be able to stack the riser
joints and decided to develop a stackable version of the product,” McBride
says.
Gushing up
The starting point of today’s mega-billion-dollar oil
industry came in the 1850s when Polish pharmacist Ignacy Lukasiewicz distilled
clear kerosene from seep oil.
For centuries in North America in what is now
the U.S. state of Texas, Native Americans used tar from oil seeps to treat
ailments. In more recent history, reservoirs were unearthed when settlers
drilled deep for water. Initially, oil was considered a nuisance until its
potential was realized.
Because the reservoirs in the region were under
several hundred feet of sand, the oil was difficult to extract. Flow was slow,
and the drill holes were prone to cave-ins.
At the turn of the past century,
engineers at the Spindletop oilfield in Beaumont, Texas, tried pumping mud into
the drill hole instead of water to flush out drill cuttings. The mud stuck to
the sides of the hole and kept it from caving in.
The result was historic. On
January 10, 1901, following a noise like a cannon shot, mud, natural gas and
then oil came shooting out of the ground in a gusher that rose to a height of
more than 150 feet. Lucas 1, as the well was dubbed, initially flowed at a rate
of nearly 100,000 barrels a day, more than all the other producing wells in the
U.S. combined.
For more information please
contact
news@trelleborg.com
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