Umbilical industry experience and trends

  1. Subsea
  2. Production Facilities


Umbilical Industry Experience and Trends

Many offshore projects require the consideration of greater depths, longer umbilicals and more control functions than those common in the past. Further, most oil companies are striving to reduce the time required to complete such developments. As a result, the selection of umbilicals has become more critical as many factors such as performance, fluid compatibility, impact on interfaces, ease of deployment, etc. must be considered during the selection process.


There are two continuing trends in the offshore umbilical industry:

(1) Oil production in deeper and deeper waters;

(2) The desire to perform subsea Processing; Subsea field development moves to deeper and deeper water depths. This requires higher and higher demands on the umbilical systems to ensure operational integrity throughout the lifetime of the fields.

The need for feeding of electrical power to subsea equipment, such as subsea pumps, is also increasing because subsea processing technology is considered more and more these years. Both these trends affect the umbilical design that the weaker cross-section components must be able to withstand the larger forces and elongations. Besides, the cross-section must include high voltage power elements.

References

[1] R.C. Swanson, V.S. Rao, C.G. Langner, G. Venkataraman, Metal Tube Umbilicals- Deepwater and Dynamic Considerations, OTC 7713, Offshore Technology Conference, Houston, Texas, 1995.

[2] International Standards Organization, Petroleum and Natural Gas Industries, Design and Operation of Subsea Production Systems, Part 5: Subsea Umbilicals, ISO 13628-5, (2009).

[3] Technip Technology and Teamwork Achieve World Class Success for Shell Perdido, Oil & Gas Journal on line, Volume 108 (Issue 31) (April 1, 010). http://www.ogfj.com/ index.

[4] N. Terdre, Nexans Looking beyond Na Kika to Next Generation of Ultra-deep Umbilicals, Offshore, Volume 64, Issue 3, Mar 1, 2004, p://www.offshore-mag. com/index.

[5] O. Heggdal, Integrated Production Umbilical (IPU for the Fram Ost (20 km Tie-Back) Qualification and Testing, Deep Offshore Technology Conference and Exhibition (DOT), New Orleans, Louisiana, 2004, December.

[6] Det Norske Veritas, Submarine Pipeline Systems, DNV-OS-F101, (2007).

[7] Det Norske Veritas, Fatigue Strength Analysis of Offshore Steel Structures, DNV-RPC203 (2010).

[8] J. Hoffman, W. Dupont, B. Reynolds, A Fatigue-Life Prediction Model for Metallic Tube Umbilicals, OTC 13203 (2001).

[9] W.K. Kavanagh, K. Doynov, D. Gallagher, Y. Bai, The Effect of Tube Friction on the Fatigue Life of Steel Tube Umbilical RisersdNew Approaches to Evaluating Fatigue Life using Enhanced Nonlinear Time Domain Methods, OTC 16631, Offshore Technology Conference, Houston, Texas, 2004.


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