Perdido Development: World's First Ultra-deepwater Drilling Production Facility

摘要

The Perdido Development Project is an ultra-deep water development of the Great White, Silver Tip and Tobago fields in the remote southwestern Gulf of Mexico (Figure 1). Perdido will be the first to produce from the Lower Tertiary (Paleogene) geologic setting in the Gulf. Moored in 7817 feet (2,382m) of water in Alaminos Canyon Block 857, the spar host will be the world's deepest drilling and production facility. In 9627 feet (2,934m) of water, the Tobago subsea oil well will be the deepest producing well in the world. This paper will provide an overview of the Perdido project, discussing the challenges that had to be overcome and the innovations that had to be developed to successfully deliver the project.Perdido Development facilities (Figure 2) consist of:1. Truss spar with light weight, "single-lift" topsides2. Six-slot, wet-tree, direct vertical access (DVA) well system with a full capability drilling rig3. 34 subsea wells including the 22 DVA wells under the spar4. All production commingled on the seafloor, gas separated from liquids and liquids pumped from the seafloor up to the spar host5. Throughput: oil 100 mbopd, gas 200 mmscfd, water 40 mbwpd, water injection 80 mbwpd6. Oil and gas export pipelinesThe significant challenges to delivering Perdido fell into the categories of safety, the need for new technology and low cost solutions, and overcoming overheated market conditions. With all of the many difficulties to be overcome, the team committed itself early in the project to intensely focus on safety as the highest priority. The result has been both outstanding project execution safety performance across many locations and in the raising of the bar of how safety is incorporated into platform designs. As to the technical and cost challenges, Perdido's difficult reservoirs, high well count and ultra-deep water made the development uneconomic with conventional deepwater technologies. To produce the wells, reduce the size of the host and reduce the cost of development, an innovative system of new technologies was required, consisting primarily of wet-tree, direct vertical access (DVA) wells with a Subsea Boosting System. Sanctioning and executing the project during one of the industry's most overheated markets created numerous cost, quality, resourcing and delivery problems, requiring extraordinary effort from the project team and contractors to keep the project on track.