Canada-based Ivanhoe Energy and floater specialist SBM Offshore have formed a global strategic alliance, combining their respective expertise to create Floating Production, Upgrading, Storage and Offloading (FPUSO) vessels.
The two companies are combining their respective technologies and experience to produce a “first of its kind design” for offshore facilities that will produce and upgrade heavy oil from offshore fields with crude oil quality down to 10° API gravity, or lower.
Industry experts have estimated that offshore heavy oil resources exceed 500 Bn bbl recoverable, according to the companies. Given the global abundance of such oil deposits and depleting conventional oil supplies, the alliance could crease significant potential for the offshore heavy oil sector, it added.
“We expect this combination of technologies to become the pre-eminent method for producing and upgrading heavy oil at offshore locations around the world,” said Michael Wyllie, SBM’s Chief Technology Officer.
Ivanhoe’s Heavy-to-Light (HTL) process is a partial upgrading technology that drastically reduces the viscosity of stranded heavy oil resources and produces a high quality synthetic crude oil, said the company. In addition to creating operating efficiencies, the technology will greatly improve the economics of heavy oil development, it added. HTL’s small footprint and modularization capability makes installation on FPSOs possible.
In addition, by providing a source of lighter oil on the FPUSO, some of this fluid can be re-circulated back to the subsea wells, providing a robust solution to overcome the flow assurance challenges of subsea heavy oil wells. This feature could be an enabler for heavy oil field developments, especially those in deep water, say the two companies.
“Ivanhoe Energy and SBM collaborated over the last two years to develop this new concept,” said Dr. Michael Silverman, Ivanhoe Energy Chief Technology Officer. “In 2012, with engineering support from AMEC Engineering, we completed the conceptual design of an offshore FPUSO facility that will upgrade up to 60,000 barrels per day.”
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