Offshore Connectivity and Ultra-Long Tiebacks Solutions for Oil and Gas

Abstract

Abstract The Oil and Gas Industry is forced to go in deeper and deeper water further and further offshore to find new oil or gas. For the Oil Co., this means operating offshore facilities safely, reliably and efficiently in harsh environment far from shore. Alternative development scenarios involve the implementation of subsea facilities and ultra-long tiebacks. At the same time, the industry is placing more and more emphasis on integrated operations driven from onshore control centres. Highly reliable communications solutions are required to enable Oil Co to fulfil these objectives. Large bandwidth and low latency links between the offshore facilities and the shore are essential as well as ubiquitous communications to all company personnel and contractors engaged in the offshore field development area. This paper describes the overall solutions to address these needs. It reviews available technologies to address connectivity and communications needs that are particularly suited to deployment in offshore environment, in particular submarine fiber optics and radio including Wimax, and present Alcatel-Lucent vision on the application of these technologies to respond to the needs of the Oil and Gas Industry. The paper describes in more details, for both offshore connectivity and ultra-long tiebacks, possible optical data and electrical power architectures together with the products and their heritage, including the submarine 10kW DC-DC power converter, optical in line repeater, sub sea transponder and last mile connections. The hardware breakdown structure, technology gaps and solution costs are reviewed and discussed.