Offshore staff
THE WOODLANDS, Texas – RPSEA held its Ultra-Deepwater Technology Conference recently and noted some future areas of research as well as discussing the status of current projects and the future of the program itself.
In his chairman’s message, Dan Lopez, president of the New Mexico Institute of Mining & Technology, said there is a need to focus on cyber security going forward.
“A lot of information can be obstructed by the intrusion of foreign and business competitors,” Lopez said. “It can be controlled so that the results damage as little as possible, but it cannot be prevented.”
As well as pointing out the technological advances coming from RPSEA, Bob Siegfried, president, sounded a note of caution saying that the organization faces the sunset rule at the end of 3Q 2014, and that the program has to be approved for any new work to begin past that date.
Siegfried also complimented the group for adding an emphasis on safety to its projects on economic and technological advances.
In reference to the Ultra-Deepwater Program within RPSEA, James Pappas, vice president, pointed out that any remaining funding has to be awarded before the sunset date, and that RPSEA has a contingency plan in place to maintain its momentum if the Department of Interior extends funding of the program beyond the 2014 closing date.
Following the opening session, the technology update presentations were divided into two tracts with one tract covering flow assurance, drilling and interventions, subsea tiebacks, and environmental and safety risks in a total of 17 individual talks. Track two encompassed riser systems, reservoirs and geosciences, metocean issues, and floating systems in the same number of different presentations.
11/04/2013