Announcing the results at London’s Subsea Technology conference, Douglas-Westwood oil and gas manager Steve Robertson said market interest was being driven by the prospect of improved recovery and production.
“If operators’ performance expectations are met, then over the next decade expenditure on subsea processing could in our ‘most likely’ scenario amount to over $3.4 billion,” Robertson said.
“A total of 131 seabed boosting applications are expected to account for 54% of this 10-year total, in addition to 28 forecast separation systems, we expect 1005 multiphase meters and 15 wet gas compressors.”
He said Western Europe was expected to be the leading regional market with a mid-range projected capex of $1.1 billion between 2001 and 2015, followed by Africa ($788 million), Latin America ($594 million) and North America ($576 million).
OTM senior consultant George Trowbridge said demand for subsea processing used to be evenly driven by technical, production and financial factors.
“With oil prices having risen dramatically, the drivers for subsea processing have changed,” Trowbridge said.
“Production-related drivers are now seen as being much more important.”
Trowbridge said the study also found that oil companies had changed their opinion about using subsea processing.
“Whilst both psychological hurdles, such as the naturally risk averse nature of oil companies, and financial hurdles, such as capital costs, are still high on the list of barriers to the uptake of subsea processing, there has been a shift in operator opinions so that now equipment reliability and operability is now seen as the highest-ranked barrier,” he said.
“The changes in the drivers of and barriers to subsea processing are reflected in the forecast uptake of the technology.
“In our 2000 and 2003 surveys, a number of fields were identified as possible sites for subsea processing, whilst in the latest 2006 survey, several oil companies now have firm plans to use subsea processing, with potential areas of application spanning all the major deepwater regions of the world.”
The 140-page Subsea Processing Gamechanger report investigates the factors driving the interest in subsea processing, the technologies of subsea boosting and separation, control and monitoring and power, installation, intervention and system modularity and case studies.
