From Oslo: The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD) believes that subsea tiebacks represent the most relevant solution for 68 out of 88 current discoveries on the Norwegian Continental Shelf.

But for these projects to be sanctioned, the fast and cost-effective development of technology is vital.

New subsea technologies and systems must be qualified before use to build confidence that they will function as intended, but DNV GL said current subsea technology qualification processes can be inefficient and time consuming.

It is calling for a standardised system qualification approach and joint industry effort to drive faster take-up of new technology and value creation in subsea.

A new position paper “Subsea system qualification: Towards a standardized approach” by DNV GL’s Strategic Research & Innovation unit aims to answer two questions: How can confidence in new subsea systems be demonstrated in a faster and more efficient way? How can already qualified technologies be requalified in an effective manner for reuse in similar systems or under slightly different operating conditions?

The position paper proposes a joint industry effort in three steps to enable more effective technology development and implementation in the field: 1) Establish common industry principles, and consolidate a common framework for system qualification founded on existing industry procedures; 2) Develop a methodology to standardise system qualification for common use across the upstream oil and gas industry; and 3) Pilot and demonstrate the developed methodology and roll-out a recommended practice.

“The subsea industry needs to overcome key challenges such as cost reductions, enabling increased recovery and complex field developments. At the same time, the future trend still points towards more complex systems, which require integrating process, power and control systems subsea. Assuring safety and reliability on a system level is critical when interfaces become more complex and system integration failures are harder to identify,” said DNV GL’s Tore Myhrvold, researcher and lead author of the paper.

“Developing a standardised approach to subsea technology qualification will enable companies to leverage on each other’s qualification efforts and results, reduce the overall development time and ultimately enable faster innovation in the subsea sector,” he added.

Previous experience has shown that focus on qualification in the early phases of development reduces risk of failures in late phase testing.

Failures and errors in tests that are run in later development stages, such as factory acceptance tests and system integration tests, are expensive to fix since they might result in costly rework and reiteration of the design process.

Offshore