Abstract
In order that the production and profits of petroleum companies do not decline, new oil field need to be discovered and exploited. Many of these new discoveries are offshore deepwater fields. However, the drop in oil prices in the last few years has made this type of exploration, which is already challenging in itself, even more difficult, so that companies are postponing or even canceling several deepwater projects. Innovation, new technologies and new concepts of oil and gas production and processing are necessary to make deepwater projects feasible and increase their competitiveness. The aim of this paper was to analyze the subsea processing of oil production as a strategy to reduce both capital and operating costs to enable remote offshore exploration. In addition, a discussion of the benefits and challenges of this strategy was also presented. It also includes a case study at the Lula field, in Brazilian pre-salt. Results demonstrate that the use of subsea separation has great potential to reduce OPEX and CAPEX on offshore projects. The current case study demonstrates a cost reduction due to the investment in the separators of around US$ 6.1 billion, a reduction about 6 to 12 times in the power needed to lift the production and a reduction of about 5 to 7 times in the expenditures with natural gas as fuel for the evaluated scenarios.
Highlights
As can be seen subsea production techniques has been increasing at an accelerated pace, and it has made exploration projects around the world possible, especially in deepwater, remote, extreme climatic and low pressure reservoirs with heavy and viscous oils, whether they are green or brown fields (Hendricks et al, 2016; Kondapi et al, 2017)
Results demonstrate that the use of subsea separation has great potential to reduce OPEX and capital expenditures (CAPEX) on offshore projects
The following case study aims to analyze the feasibility of using a subsea separation system in a Brazilian pre-salt field
Summary
The following case study aims to analyze the feasibility of using a subsea separation system in a Brazilian pre-salt field. After the study of the energy pumping cost which is part of the CAPEX assessment for a system composed by a FSO with subsea production system, the economic feasibility analysis was carried out as a function of the cost of natural gas used as fuel for energy generation and the cost of surface platforms and subsea separators. Another important point for the definition of the scenarios is that the strategy chosen in this case study for the use of subsea separators in the Lula field was the same one used by Petrobras in the Marlim field. It is expected that field would be carried out by 10 production modules, as in to Table 1
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