ABERDEEN— Gavin Cowie is one of the stalwarts of subsea engineering and operations sector. His 25-year career has been characterized by an intuitive drive to innovate and improve. He has conceived, developed, tested and delivered a wide range of successful subsea intervention solutions and has held key management and engineering positions at Expro Group and FMC in Aberdeen and Norway.

He is currently the founding member of Interventek, having previously co-founded another successful subsea engineering company, Enovate Systems, which was acquired by Aker Solutions in 2013.

Cowie’s new company is on a mission to revolutionize operations across the complete lifecycle of the well with the introduction of a unique shear-and-seal safety valve that delivers improved operational safety, reliability and well integrity at a fraction of current costs.

The Revolution Valve is designed to cut through wireline and coiled tubing should the need arise during well intervention operations and then form a reliable seal to contain well pressure. The valve is unique in the way it cuts and seals, avoiding collateral damage to the sealing surface during cutting, thus improving reliability, safety and performance. It costs a fraction of the price of conventional products. As Cowie is quick to point out, the valve delivers twice the performance at half the cost.

Addressing Problems

At the heart of Cowie’s drive is his firm belief that ball valves are the modus operandi for the subsea industry simply because that is how it has traditionally operated.

“Ball valves are essentially fluid control devices and quite acceptable fluid control devices, but the function that we’re trying to provide needs to be both a fluid control device and an obstruction cutter, and ball valves were never designed as obstruction cutters,” Cowie explained. “For an upstream well intervention valve, we need to satisfy both requirements, and a ball valve is not a good candidate because if you use it for cutting then its sealed surfaces will become damaged and it will not, thereafter, be able to provide its primary function of being a fluid containment device.

“The cutting edges damage the seal surface after the cutter’s performed and compromise its subsequent ability to seal,” he added.

Today’s subsea valve is essentially a cylindrical housing with a cylindrical piston and a cylindrical cage in a spherical ball—multilayered components. That form was established in the ‘90s when the bore was about three inches and there was 3,000 psi pressure; and that was fine for the North Sea. “Now we’re at 7 3/8ths and 15,000 psi,” Cowie added. “Some of the loads through all these layers are getting huge, and they’re all swelling and binding. It’s just a poor choice to have all these cylinders stacked one inside each other, conveying a dirty fluid with lots of sand in it and things moving up and down. It’s a poor design. We got away with it back in the day because the bore size was so small, and the walls of all these elements were quite thick and chunky. But as the bore size increases and the loads increase they all become marginal.

“When I came into this industry back in 1996, I said, ‘that’s a most peculiar arrangement you’ve adopted. Why are you putting the hydraulics there?’ But that is the way it was done, and I didn’t have the confidence at that stage to say, ‘well that’s not right, you know.’”

This time around Cowie had a clean sheet of paper and decided to externalize the hydraulics.

“That’s hugely beneficial because to take the traditional ball valve apart you need all sorts of specialist tools that can grab and extract the pistons. There are all sorts of vulnerabilities and inconveniences with this arrangement,” he said. “But the industry was lazy, and they took a form that was established back in the ‘90s—small bore, relatively low pressure—and just scaled it and thinned things, and the form didn’t really change.

“Now there’s all sorts of limitations and problems, and expense,” Cowie continued. “Instead of being able to use bog standard materials to make this, now that we’ve got high pressure versions, they are having to use exotic alloys at huge expense to make this.”

A Novel Approach

The Revolution Valve is a novel, proprietary technology that provides a compact, elastomer free well bore sealing arrangement with superior obstruction cutting capability and unprecedented post-cut sealing performance. The principal underpinning the valve is the separation of the cutting edge from the sealing surfaces. This separation enables certain components to be optimized for cutting and conveniently protects the sealing components from cutting induced damage. The most effective use of the valve will be on landing strings but it also has potential for use on surface intervention, open water intervention and subsea abandonment.

The valve has already undergone various levels of qualification including some in-house trials to industry codes, and the company is ready and waiting for the industry to come calling.

“We’ve got to just keep pushing,” Cowie said. “This is genuinely a fraction of the cost and twice the performance to traditional options. The ball valve was never designed as a cutter, so it’s always a bit of a compromise. All they’ve done is taken a fluid control ball valve and beefed it up a bit, but it still won’t offer post-cut sealing. As soon as they cut, that’s it; all bets are off. They won’t guarantee to seal the well. It doesn’t fulfil that combination of high grade requirements to cut and seal. They can’t claim it, so it’s an inferior solution. And it’s now an expensive inferior solution.

“As a young company with a game-changing disruptive technology, we are pushing against people’s inbuilt preference to choose what they are used to—older, familiar, more conventional technology. But now that we are achieving traction in the market, and our products are proving themselves in the field, we are finding that clients are approaching us to deliver new solutions to industry challenges.”

—Mark Venables