Wood Group announced the fourth phase of a joint industry project at the Australian Oil & Gas Expo in Perth last week involving Woodside and its Browse partner Shell, Inpex and PTTEP looking at improving subsea equipment design and reduce requirements for costly and time-consuming interventions in Australia's challenging offshore warm water environment.

 

Woodside chief operating officer Mike Utsler told Energy News on the sidelines of AOG last Friday that as nearly 25% of the world's oil production is expected to be produced in a subsea operating environment, the imperative is ensuring that those operations are designed and enabled for decades on the sea floor safely, efficiently and reliably.

 

There is also a limit to how far industry can develop subsea resources and tie them back to surface infrastructure, so the new JIP, far from "just altruistically focused", is about extending the reach of subsea developments to support smaller fields than would otherwise have been viable.

 

"If we're going to see the next wave of developments, be it offshore Australia or around the world, it's going to be about developing smaller pools through extended reach back to existing infrastructure to enable us to load and maximise the value of our existing infrastructure," he said.

 

With that in mind, Utsler said the Pluto pipelines were installed with a larger capacity than was needed for the existing train, so there was room for additional throughout in the existing offshore infrastructure, a legacy of stalled plans for Pluto 2.

 

He said the step-change in subsea technology has opened new possibilities for Pluto that were not available even three years earlier.

 

"The more you can leverage that existing offshore infrastructure, tie smaller fields into it as opposed to needing the big 5-10Tcf discoveries, you can have half -to-1Tcf discoveries tied back through that infrastructure that then lets you look at the step-wise expansion of the onshore facilities," Utsler said.

 

"One of the advantages of why we've started openly talking about Pluto expansion is that we realised that waiting for the challenge of being able to bring a 5-10Tcf field - while there are some out there still to be developed and we happen to have a few of those and we're excited about their potential - there's a lot of discovered undeveloped half-a-Tcf-type resources, 10-12 of which could fuel a 1MMtpa train for years and years."

 

He said the key consideration was how to connect those to a grid, and the answer is a new ‘hub and spoke' model that Woodside hopes can be replicated globally.

 

"We're trying to create a ‘hub' of surface-piercing infrastructure and pipeline with the ‘spokes' that technologically are driven to be ever-longer in a subsea sense tied back to that hub that lets you use the existing infrastructure within northwest Western Australia, and to replicate that model in places around the world," he said.

 

He said the miniaturisation of new technologies, lower costs through the supply chain and a change of mindset around access to, and utilisation of, offshore infrastructure versus onshore have enabled Woodside to try new things at Pluto. 

 

They include the idea of driving an all-electric subsea connection, as opposed to needing long hydraulics, and therefore lots of pumping equipment to move and manage the hydraulics. 

 

Advances in material sciences have also brought differing metallurgies to bear that are now available that are stronger materials. 

 

"Look in China today, from the remote power generation to city, the high density transmission cable that essentially has almost no power loss," Utsler said as an example.

 

"One of the biggest issues in the power grids is the loss of electricity from its generation because of the quality of degradation that occurs.

 

"Technologies now reduce that from 20-30% to 1-2% over long periods."

 

Importantly, cost structure has never been better, Utsler said. 

 

He said supply chain costing structure from drilling and completions to subsurface manufacturing to steel cost is now at a stage where it enables commercialisation of fields considered uneconomic to develop.