Offshore staff
GALVESTON, Texas –With the premise that “more technology per barrel” is going to be required to keep pace with demand, Siemens has brought its range of capabilities to bear on the business of supplying power to large-scale subsea processing facilities. Among the products and services the company is featuring at the 2012 Subsea Tieback Forum & Exhibition is the Siemens Subsea Power Grid.
The challenge is to supply subsea processing equipment with power from shore or from a platform. Siemens combines its industrial transformers, switchgear, and variable-speed drives to the Power Grid. These components permit an installation on a common base frame distributed at the seabed with retrievable parts.
The power system parts on the common base come in pressure-compensated enclosures and preferably operate in oil, says Siemens. Passive cooling helps to favorably influence the mean time between failures of the overall system. Power electronics and vacuum circuit breakers go into SF6 filled containers at low overpressure.
Dedicated power management and performance monitoring helps extend the service life of the installations and a predictive system monitors and stores key data about the Power Grid components and provide blackout protection.
Further, Siemens has extended its subsea technologies with the acquisition of Poseidon and Bennex. These acquisitions target marinzation and a broader range of services from Siemens. The company now can provide complete in field subsea distribution systems including hydraulics, electrical, and fiber-optic components supplied either individually or in a package as part of umbilical termination assemblies/heads.
Bennex, for example, has designed a high-power changeover switch to switch three-phase electrical power between high-voltage, high-power consumers like subsea pump motors and pipe heating systems. The switch, being shown at the SSTB exhibition by Siemens, is a remote-controlled unit wherein switching can take place only in a power off mode and the hydraulic switching system is designed to keep the power switch in the same position if hydraulic pressure is lost.
Poseidon adds its subsea engineering capabilities to Siemens other engineering services. The group can evaluate concepts and provide detailed engineering for services across the life of a field.
Siemens has several decades of experience providing water treatment systems and is taking those systems subsea. Siemens has hydrocyclone separators, flotation separators, filter media separators, and is working on an electrochlorination system for water injection.
3/7/2012
