GE Oil & Gas is in the process of getting some interesting technology into the market, including an increased life wellhead.

Nick Dunn GE Oil & Gas’ senior vice president for services and offshore in subsea systems, told SEN at the 2015 SPE Offshore Europe Conference, “It is a very capex- and opex-focussed world right now, and we have continued to look at what the right products and solutions are for that.”

One product the company is introducing is the SFX wellhead, which expands the fatigue life of a wellhead by 16 times. SFX meets or exceeds global fatigue requirements under multiple load conditions across the major operators worldwide.

Dunn said, “Sixteen times is a huge factor and it has come about through reviewing the design and moving some of the stress points. We have managed to incorporate that into our existing wellhead standards so we’re able to use the existing tool fleet we have across the world to go and install them.”

The optimised geometries of the wellhead are designed to reduce stress concentrations, and extended length forgings improve heat transfer and inspection capabilities. The design benefits from welding, advanced inspection and resonance testing.

Dunn added, “As we standardise that wellhead system, we can virtually halve the lead time. There is a lot of focus on getting one spec and common manufacturing and welding specs so we can then produce these wellheads wherever we want in the world.”

Four SFX wellheads are in the process of being manufactured, which will go onto the shelf ready for deployment around the world.

GE Oil & Gas also signed a three-plus-three year subsea operations service frame agreement with Statoil for services on the Norwegian Continental Shelf.

The scope of work covers services and maintenance of subsea production systems during installation and operation phases and will be run from Dusavik.

Dunn said, “It covers about 85 trees and pods on Tordis, Vigdis Snorre and Troll. A lot of the focus is working with Statoil on STEP [Statoil Technical Efficiency Programme] for technical efficiency where they are looking to take costs out of opex and make their investments more efficient. We’re working with them and looking at how to maintain their existing production equipment, tool pools and give them some value.

“We’re discussing condition-based monitoring of their existing trees where rather than bring it back and completely strip, inspect and rebuild, we can take the data we currently have and use it to perform a more cost-effective repair.”

GE recently has expanded its service facility in Montrose. “We have expanded what we can do around subsea repair and upgrade and invested in the machine shop to the tune of $12.4 million

“We have done some projects recently where we have taken a full subsea tree, stripped it down to its constituent parts , inspected, done some repair and upgrade, rebuilt it and had it back out offshore within five weeks.”

And at the company’s facility in Onne, Nigeria, 10 trees from the Bonga Field are in the process of being fully stripped, refurbished, rebuilt, tested and installed in Nigeria and probably in other areas of Africa.

Offshore