Claudio Paschoa

Although the Scottish chemical technology company Aubin originally specialized as a cement and stimulation additive supplier, it has made strong inroads into the Oil and Gas industry in recent years, with the subsea sector being their main target.

The company is based in Ellon, Aberdeenshire and has been in business since 1987. Some 6 years ago they came up with a novel product, which came to be known as “gel with a memory”. It is mainly used for pipe pigging purposes as it can be squashed but returns to its original shape. Named L-gel, the product is also used for risers, which are considered impossible to be pigged. It can go around tight bends and through blocked areas where a conventional pig would probably get stuck.

In its other form, the L-gel can also be supplied as a liquid, so that if a client has a pipeline where it is impossible to get a pig in, the L-gel can be introduced as a liquid gel and the pig forms inside the pipe. Other gels in the company’s pigging line may be used for cleaning pipelines and removing debris.

Aubin started a strategic partnership with Brazilian Nortech to distribute  Aubin products and provide services covering pipeline gels and pig gels. Although Aubin has its own manufacturing plant in Ellon, the Scotish company is also looking at the possibility of building a manufacturing plant in Brazil in the future as it believes the market in Brazil may have great demand for their products and with the added benefit that a plant in Brazil could also cover manufacturing for prospective clients in West Africa, where Aubin has already done some tests for clients and is on the verge of closing important contracts.

Aubin also has interesting products for the ballast market, such as Liquidense, which makes it possible to secure objects to the seabed quickly without the used of heavy cranes. In a very interesting development they can use one gel to provide controlled buoyancy to lower heavy equipment to the seabed and use Liquidense to hold the equipment in place.

Claudio Paschoa

http://youtu.be/1xOEVyLpbzU - L-gel pig introduction

C&C entered the Brazilian market with its autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) almost ten years ago. The company has had a steady growth in the country and now provides services that involve measurement of water properties, seabed topography, and seabed soil characterization. C&C uses their own vessels as platforms to launch their AUVs, covering the depth range from ultra shallow all the way to ultra deep 4500 meters and their clients use the data acquired by their AUVs to support their underwater infrastructure construction plans. In Brazil the company has enlarged its scope of services on demand by clients after the success of their seafloor mapping technology using side scan sonars mounted on AUVs C&C is also undertaking extensive work in oceanography and environmental monitoring. Today this specialized work makes up a good part of their revenues in Brazil. As any foreign company working in Brazil, C&C technologies also has to deal with local content policies for the vessels they operate, where after the first two years, a vessel must operate in Brazil with 66% local content. This is one of their major challenges as it is no simple matter to train local technicians to operate their highly complex AUV systems. As the demand for their services continues to grow, so does the challenge to keep up to local content demands when crewing their vessels. C&C is currently fulfilling a $50 million contract by Petrobras. The 730 day contract utilizes C & C’s C-Surveyor II AUV and M/V Northern Resolution vessel. This contract can actually be renewed for an additional 730 days, making the contract potentially worth $100 million. The effort includes running pipeline routes and site surveys to support the exploration and production of deepwater pre salt plays off the brasilian coast. C & C crews are performing sidescan sonar and sub-bottom profiler surveys, coring, and both hull-mounted and AUV-mounted multibeam bathymetric surveys under the contract. C & C Technologies do Brasil, is headquartered in the O&G hub of Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro. The company currently employs more than 200 employees who perform geophysical and marine construction surveys. In addition to providing field surveys, it is fully equipped to process data and compile hazard reports. This highlights the great investments the company has made in its infrastructure in Brazil, where it actually offers a greater scope of services than it does in its U.S. Headquarters.   

Recently Petrobras, the Brazilian national O&G operator announced that it had awarded Technip a 5-year frame agreement contract for the supply of around 1,400 kilometers of flexible pipes, with supply starting in 2013 and orders are guaranteed for at least 50% of the total value, which is currently estimated to be worth around US$2.1 billion.

The scope of the contract includes the manufacture of over 150 types and diameters of risers, flowlines and associated equipment and accessories

Flexible pipes for the contract will be produced both at Technip's existing manufacturing site in Vitoria, and also at our new manufacturing facility under construction in Açu, Brazil.

This agreement is a direct spinoff of the investment Technip made last year in building a second state-of-the-art flexible pipe plant in Brazil, which promises to apply a wide range of technological advances in manufacturing, targeting efficient and safe flex-pipe products for the deep-water plays.

This is just an example of the magnitude of pipelines being laid on the seabed and floating up to FPSOs and production rigs. In terms of seabed mounted pipelines we are talking of tens of thousands of kilometers of pipes crisscrossing the Brazilian offshore seabed and linking oil and gas to the coastal refineries. Although today most of the produce transported by pipes to refineries is composed of gas, the amount of oil carrying pipelines will dramatically increase with the new pre-salt fields coming online.

Presently, there are no effective and independent monitoring schemes for these rigid and flexible pipelines except by the monitoring done by the operators themselves. There is also no effective legislation or even guidelines as to where these pipelines may be laid.

Any environmental concerns are foreshadowed by logistics needs of the operators. Obviously these pipelines, rigid or flexible are vital to the growth of the Brazilian O&G marked but with such a huge amount of pipelines being laid it appears to be necessary to have greater transparency as to how decisions are made as to where the pipelines will be placed and what resources are available to contain possible leaks caused by ruptures is these pipelines.

Will it be necessary for a major spill to happen before authorities decide to monitor these thousands of kilometers of pipelines?

Claudio Paschoa

The group that will be awarded the construction contract for this novel offshore LNG production unit will be known by October 31 Petrobras is keen to begin construction of the unit as it considers offshore natural gas liquefaction vital to guarantee a efficient output for the Santos Basin pre-salt gas.

Many of the Santos Basin pre-salt fields are located over 300km from the coast, which convinced Petrobras to seek other options in order to deliver the gas to the market. Normally gas is transferred from wells to the coast through underwater pipelines but with such distances involved and with many of thereservoirs located in deep water, the national operator opted to develop this option where the ship will be moored in deepwater adjacent to some wells from which it will receive the gas, and acting as a floating refinery the ship will liquefy the gas offshore and transfer the liquefied gas to LNG carriers offshore. These carriers will the head for the coast of directly to other countries to export the pre-salt gas. It is most likely that the majority of this offshore production will target the export market as the simple fact that the carriers are loaded offshore decreases the cost of the export operation as the ships will not need to pay high taxes in Brazilian ports.

Three consortiums are participating in this tender through their technical proposals, these are:

Technip/Modec/JGC, another is composed of SBM and Chiyoda and finally there is the Saipem project.  

Petrobras´s partners in this venture are BG, Repsol and Galp, which are also partners to the national operator in various Santos Basin pre-salt fields. The Project is expected to be completed after 2015. There is only one other such project being developed in the world and that is being done by Shell and partners for the massive Australian gas fields.

Claudio Paschoa

The $1 billion contract awarded to Subsea 7 by Brazilian national oil company Petrobras, marks a new era in Subsea 7´s history. It is the first major (in terms of contract value) contract for the company after its merger with Acergy.

The contract is for development of the Guara and Lula deepwater pre-salt fields in the Santos Basin, over 300km from the coast of Rio de Janeiro, in water depth of around 2,200 meters. These plays are located in Block BM-S-9 and BM-S-11 respectively.

The EPIC (Engineering, Procurement, Installation and Pre-Commisioning) project scope consists of 4 decoupled riser systems featuring, four submerged buoys each of 1,900 tons to be installed at a depth of approximately 250 meters below the sea level buoy foundations and associated tethers and 27 steel catenary risers of 3.9km and associated pipeline end terminations (PLETs) of which 18 are 7.5” production lines, 3 are 9.5” water injection lines and 6 are 8” gas injection lines, and associated anchor piles and crossings. The engineering and project management work will commence with immediate effect and will be undertaken at Subsea 7 offices in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Fabrication of the rigid pipelines will be carried out at the pipeline manufacturing spoolbase, which Subsea 7 is developing at Paranaguá, in the southern state of Paraná in Brazil. Offshore installation is scheduled to commence during the second half of 2012, using Seven Oceans, Seven Seas and Skandi Seven.

These new capabilities developed by Subsea 7 along the last few years will be put through their paces during this project. It will be one of the first if not the first major project for the new Subsea 7 pipeline manufacturing plant, which is strategically located close to the southern tip of the Santos Basin and very close to the port of Paranaguá, which may not be widely known out of Brazil but is the 2 largest port in the country to date.

Not only will the new Paranaguá plant´s capabilities be tested, Subsea 7 will have to use a wide range of surface and subsea assets to get the job done and keep to its deadlines. These plays are considered of strategic importance to the development of the Brazilian pre-salt, as they are the first major pre-salt producers, and have been acting as test benches for all the other pre-salt plays already discovered. The 3 vessels involved will be supporting ROV operations, pipe laying operations, along with riser and buoy installation and testing. It can be said that this is one of the most important pre-salt projects to date as it will prepare the connections from the Aker subsea trees already installed to the FPSOs that will control production and distribution, therefore a vital link between the pre-salt upstream and downstream.

Claudio Paschoa

The Society for Underwater Technology (SUT) is a multi-disciplinary learned society that brings together organisations and individuals with a common interest in underwater technology, ocean science and offshore engineering.
SUT was founded in 1966 and has members from more than 40 countries, including engineers, scientists, other professionals and students working in these areas.