Application of De-Icing Techniques for Arctic Offshore Production Facilities

Abstract

With increasing energy demand, the oil and gas industry is pushing towards new unexplored remote Arctic areas. More than 25% of undiscovered petroleum reserves are expected to be in the Arctic region. Moreover, it is estimated that approximately 84% of the undiscovered oil and gas occurs offshore. There are numerous challenges and environmental factors that must be overcome before one can conduct oil and gas exploration, and engage production activities in Arctic regions. Superstructure icing from sea spray and atmospheric icing affect operation and maintenance of offshore production facilities in various ways including repair time, failure rate of mechanical and electrical components, power losses, life cycle cost, and safety hazard and can cause downtime in the facilities. These problems are motivating designers, manufacturers and safety researchers to find better practical solutions for ice protection technologies. Many active and passive anti-icing and de-icing techniques have been used in different industries such as electric power. However, Arctic offshore operational conditions provide new challenges for application of these methods and they have limitation of usage due to harsh and sensitive environment and wilderness, lack of infrastructure as well as distance to the market. Hence, such conditions must be considered during design and operation phase for anti-icing and de-icing techniques. This paper discusses how operational conditions of Arctic region can affect the application of available anti-icing and de-icing techniques. Moreover, it will discuss different types of ice accretion and their hazard for the Arctic offshore production facilities.