FMC Technologies, Inc. (FMC), a provider of technology solutions for the energy industry, has won a contract from Petroleo Brasileiro S.A. (Petrobras) to supply a subsea separation and pumping system for the matured Marlim field, located in the Campos Basin, offshore Brazil. The contract is valued at about $90 million in revenue to FMC.
The subsea separation module will separate heavy oil, gas, sand and water at a water depth of about 2,950 feet.
The subsea separation system will be jointly engineered between FMC’s operations in Brazil, Norway and the Netherlands. Final manufacturing and integration activities will be performed at the company’s Rio de Janeiro facility and deliveries are likely to begin in 2011.
The main purpose of the system is to debottleneck the floating production facility and increase production by removing unwanted water from the production stream, at the seabed. This system will use water re-injection to increase reservoir pressure and boost production.
The subsea separation, pumping and water re-injection system will receive the production stream, which contains a mixture of oil, gas, water and sand, and will first separate the gas from the liquids. Then, the heavy oil will be separated from the water, using a novel pipe separation design that was licensed and developed in cooperation with StatoilHydro ASA.
The system will also integrate FMC’s proprietary water treatment and sand handling technologies as part of the subsea separation system. The separated gas will be added back to the oil stream to aid its lifting to the FPU, while the separated water will be pumped back into the reservoir to further increase production.
According to the company, the Marlim subsea separation system will be the first in the industry to accomplish the use of subsea separation in a deepwater and mature field environment, reinjection of water into a production reservoir, and separation of heavy oil in a subsea environment.
Apart from this deepwater subsea contract, FMC received three more contracts in June 2009 which are valued at about $300 million in revenue to the company. The three contracts includes Eni SpA’s contract for the manufacture and supply of subsea equipment for its Kitan field development, contract from the Jubilee Integrated Project team and StatoilHydro’s contract for the manufacture and installation of surface wellheads and surface production trees for the Peregrino project.
It may be noted that the Marlim development, which started operating since 1991, consists of 129 wells and eight floating production units (FPU). After about 20 years in operation, the mature field is now producing an increasing amount of water, which is limiting the oil handling capacity of the surface facilities, and sand, which has the potential for damaging the overall system.
The Floating Production Unit P-13, in March 1991, produced the first oil from Marlim field. FMC Technologies supplied the GLL-I subsea tree which achieved a new world water-depth record with the well MRL-3 located at 721 metres of water.
The Marlim field development is located in the northeastern part of Campos Basin about 110 km offshore Rio de Janeiro, Brazil at water depths ranging from 650 to 2,600 meters. The oil field covers an area of 130 km2 with water depths ranging up to 1,000 metres.