John Bradbury
Special Correspondent
With demands for maintenance and modifications increasing offshore Norway and globally, Aker Solutions’ service facility at Coast Center Base in Ågotnes, near Bergen, is well placed to capture new opportunities for equipment refurbishment.
“The market is growing continuously,” says Arne Riple, Base Manager and Vice President, Subsea Lifecycle Services within Aker Solutions. He sees around 25% growth in activity this year compared with 2010. “There is an increasing demand for MMO (maintenance, modifications, and operations) work and a large part of that is a carry over from contracts we won in 2009,” he adds.
That belief was backed up by Aker’s second quarter results published in August 2010, which forecast growth in subsea infrastructure spending in 2010 and beyond, driven in particular by field developments in Brazil, the North Sea, West Africa, and Southeast Asia.
A center of subsea excellence in Bergen – the Subsea Life Cycle Service base at Ågotnes operated by Aker Solutions.
New work is coming from new field developments where newbuild facilities are now being installed and Aker Solutions at Ågotnes is part of that picture, supporting offshore construction of new subsea-related hardware. Dong Energy’s Trym and Oselvar projects in the Norwegian North Sea are two new projects being supported from Ågotnes. Others are Eni’s Goliat oil development in the Barents Sea, and existing fields in production such as Kristin, Morvin, Fram and Vilje, and more recently Åsgard and Ormen Lange in the Norwegian Sea.
Aker Solutions won a NOK 400-million ($68.49-million) contract from Dong Energy E&P Norge in March 2009 to supply a subsea production system for the Trym development, and for Oselvar, the company has supplied a subsea template and manifold.
Goliat involves major input from the base. In September 2009, Aker Subsea Systems was contracted to supply subsea production systems for the development. Its remit involving project management, engineering, procurement, fabrication, and equipment testing through start-up of Goliat. The program calls for eight integrated subsea templates plus 22 wellheads and production trees, along with control umbilicals, riser bases and workover systems. In the longer term, Aker intends to build a new base farther north at Hammerfest to support Goliat.
Tree overhauls
Demand for improved oil recovery is also having an impact at Ågotnes. Operators are striving to increase recovery factors by 60% for subsea completed wells and by 70% for platform wells. A further stimulus is coming from the trend towards electronic or ‘E-fields’, as operators seek higher levels of remote control over their wells and subsea systems.
“We are also involved in the refurbishment and upgrades of existing trees which have been placed on the seabed for several years,” Riple explains. Operators are demanding more performance from existing wells, and Ågotnes is playing its part by providing an equipment refurbishment and upgrade service for subsea trees: “For Troll we are doing that on six or seven trees a year which is a step up compared with earlier.”
The base provides support to several offshore operators, among them Statoil for the Troll, Njord, and Visund fields. Other clients include Shell; Marathon, for the Alvheim and Volund developments in the North Sea; Eni, which the base is providing support for over the next five years for the Goliat installation phase; Dong Energy, for Trym and Oselvar; and Total for the forthcoming Hild development.
Tree upgrading is being performed at the base to provide more downhole flowlines and control lines so that more valves can be put into a well. This gives operators greater flexibility and control over the parts of a reservoir from which they wish to produce oil and gas, and helps reduce water cut from wells.
With more valves per well, there is a consequent need for more control systems in subsea trees and work at Ågotnes is focusing on upgrading control lines from three to five lines for each well: “That is dependent on how old the tree is,” Riple says. “Whether they have one, two, or three lines, they are all upgraded to the same standard for better flow control.”
Expansion plans
Today, the base boasts about 460 personnel with around 130 of those working offshore at any one time. Facilities are being expanded to allow more room for those people to work. “We have just opened an additional workshop specializing in the extensive refurbishment and upgrading of our logistics equipment for the disassembly of equipment, which is fitted with a 70-metric ton (77-ton) crane, and we are adding mezzanine decking to allow us to improve our turnaround time,” Riple points out. “Our aim is to provide the Troll field with one newly refurbished subsea tree every second month from the beginning of February this year.”
Plans are to add two more logistics warehouses next year, and new office facilities. Eventually, the base will be able to accommodate another 150 personnel, increasing the total to around 600. The NOK 60-million ($10.3-million) investment should also improve the base’s capabilities.
This follows a NOK 50-million (US $7.87-million) program launched in April 2007 which involved the addition of a new subsea equipment workshop, an office block with support facilities, and a storage tent, all of which opened in 2009.
Dave Hutchinson, Aker Solutions senior vice president for Lifecycle Services, said then at the opening ceremony for that third phase of Ågotnes expansion in 2009: “The investment into Bay Three at Ågotnes is not specifically for anything short term. The driver for this is increased capacity: It gives us increased capacity to support our clients in the Norwegian sector and internationally.”
Clearly that is still the driving force behind the continuing growth of Ågotnes today.
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