From Tyneside: For nearly 25 years, companies have been bundling, winding and sheathing offshore products in Walker, just up the river from Newcastle.

Both umbilicals and flexibles have been shipped from Walker quaysides, but it is the former which have been here the longest under a variety of names.

And now there will be another new one. The Duco brand—born from a joint venture between Dunlop and Coflexip—is being discarded for the more corporate moniker of Technip Umbilicals.

What also is new is the vertical helix assembly machine (VHAM) for steel-tubed umbilicals (STU), which is housed in what is claimed to be one of the tallest single-story buildings (64 m) in Europe.

VHAM changes the manufacturing orientation. Umbilicals here have always been assembled in the horizontal, but this new assembly setup is in the vertical, as are many of the newer ones around the world.

It also is highly automated with a vast array of sensors to keep tabs on the tension in the system and other parameters with manual intervention only when necessary.

Technip has grown its manufacturing capability around the world—now including plants in Angola and Malaysia—and has invested considerable sums, around i500 million a year, in capital plant and vessels over the last three years.

No member of the Technip team would be drawn on exactly how much the new plant and facilities (two new 3,500t carousels) had cost and for good reason. They want to avoid analyst-led scrutiny which often involves trying to determine if a facility or vessel is making a return on the investment.

This is a difficult question to answer and makes for awkward questioning on Capital Days, so Technip just avoids the issue by only giving gross investment figures. This facility also benefited from a £5 million regional grant.

Total trio
What it can say is that some of the most recent contracts awards will be executed here. These include a trio for Total—Aegina (SEN, 30/21) in Nigeria, Moho Nord (30/23) in the Congo and part of the recent Kaombo (31/3) award for Angola—plus Alder (30/22) for Chevron in the North Sea.

The latter is an HP/HT field and will get a hybrid solution. There will be a steel tube line for the high-pressure downhole safety valve, but the rest of the tubes will be thermoplastic.

The history of this organization is really history of subsea in the North Sea and elsewhere. It goes back to Shell’s UMC in the early 1980's to the long-distance tiebacks at Mensa in the Gulf of Mexico and West Delta Deep in Egypt to the deepest production to date at Perdido and then to what is said to be the heaviest umbilical per meter with the biggest OD for BP Skarv.

This plant is also the heart of the R&D work on umbilicals for the group. Much of any subsea company’s technology work is focussed on deepwater and it is no different here.

One of the "next big things" will be replacing copper cores with aluminum. Technip has been working on this for some time and has fully developed it, just waiting for an operator to say "go."

There should be both cost and weight saving benefits by opting for aluminum plus very good conductivity.