Powering Energy Efficiency

Reduce energy consumption, emissions, and costs in subsea production operations

Optimizing field recovery to increase efficiency

The key to reducing your environmental impact can be found in optimizing field development. Subsea processing systems enable you to streamline field architecture while significantly reducing your project’s energy consumption, emissions, and operational cost.

Unlocking more gas reserves

There is a significant drive toward introducing more natural gas into the global energy mix. Natural gas is plentiful and provides vast reduction in CO2 emissions when burned, compared with coal, making it well positioned to grow while supporting global environmental goals. Around one-third of the proven global gas reserves are associated with offshore production. However, the ultralong tieback distances commonly found in most of the world's offshore gas fields require compression for efficient field development and recovery strategies—whether topside or subsea.

Reducing subsea power consumption

A major advantage of subsea compression is that the compressor is located closer to the reservoir. This means the power required to boost the same differential pressure is less, and the potential drawdown of the reservoir is larger. Subsea compression also stabilizes the flow and reduces flowline pressure loss. The award-winning OneSubsea multiphase compressor is the world’s first and only true subsea wet gas compressor, eliminating the need for an upstream separation facility or antisurge system and further decreasing power requirements.   

 

Subsea Processing Systems

Minimizing energy waste

The superior efficiency of subsea compression is associated with a reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases. For a large gas field, the energy savings can be approximately 70% compared with topside compression. This is equivalent to avoiding CO2 emissions of 1.44 million metric tons across 10 years.

An average onshore wind turbine with a capacity of 2,500 to 3,000 kW can produce in the range of 6 million kW.h in a year—enough to supply 1,500 average EU households with electricity (The European Wind Energy Association, 2019). In this example, the savings from applying subsea compression instead of topside is equivalent to the power generated by 48 onshore wind turbines and the consumption of more than 70,000 European households.

Powering the Oil and Gas Energy Transition with Subsea Processing
Mads Hjelmeland, Head of Processing Systems Projects at OneSubsea, discusses developments in subsea processing, boosting, and compression and their role in driving low-carbon production systems amid the global energy transition.
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