FIELD ARCHITECTURE 

In the life cycle of a project, the field development architecture and development strategy stage includes the greatest potential to impact the profitability of deepwater offshore fields.

This stage includes the following activities:

The field architecture activity regroups the sub-surface and surface development concepts.

The purpose of this document is to review the tools and technologies available to define the possible configurations for a field development in terms of type of wellhead (i.e. subsea or surface trees), floaters, export systems, flowlines and SPS arrangements, etc., and to highlight the associated limitations, advantages and disadvantages.

This report commences ( Chapter 2, Field Development strategy) with a presentation of some project development strategies, which were recently applied with the purpose of minimising the cost of field development. It also includes a flow chart which is an attempt to provide an overall view of available ‘tools’ and technologies as part of the field architecture definition.

The Chapter 3, Floater and Development concept Selection deals with the field development concept selections. It presents the different available choices in term of production floater and related equipment (e.g. export system). The section also deals with the development nature, i.e. the pros and cons of a subsea development versus a surface tree based floater.

The possible subsea architectures for the wellheads are presented in Chapter 4, Well Architecture . This includes individual satellite wells and grouped wells, which may be in cluster or template configuration.

The flowline subsea architectures are described in Chapter 5, Flowline System Architecture , presenting in particular the single flowline versus the dual 'looped' lines configuration for the production system, including the technical issues related to these architectures.

The Chapter 6, Subsea Processing and Active Lifting summarises the available ‘subsea processing’ technologies and reviews the reasons and incentives for their applications in oil and gas reservoirs developments

Tip Click these links below for access to 3D resources: 3D Interactive Model of Manifolds 3D Interactive Model of Flowlines structures 3D Interactive Model of riser structures ( SHR, HRT) 3D Interactive Model of Umbilical Structures 3D Pictures of Flowlines 3D Pictures of FPSO Hull 3D Pictures of Mooring systems 3D Pictures of Oil Offloading Lines (OOL) 3D Pictures of Buoys 3D Pictures of Risers 3D Pictures of umbilicals

This study is based on the following sources

We wish to thank the E&P companies, contractors, manufacturers for the provision with courtesy of technical information and photographs.