SUBSEA PIONEERS

[Music] good flight burs good FL plus hot looks gooded up with my feet put my up crazy fantastic Sports fanss it's TR time technology has enabled us to reach far beyond the confines of our planet this same technology that has taken us into outer space is also helping us to explore our own planet [Music] [Music] the Seas and oceans of the world cover nearly 3/4 of its surface this Inner Space as it's been called is almost as inaccessible as the distant [Music] planets the deep sea just like deep space is an environment where man is alien and where at best best he can be little more than a temporary visitor descending briefly to explore before returning to the surface but today as our increasing demand for energy takes us deeper into the ocean there is a need for something more permanent on the seabed than man himself it was 8 years ago that this project was conceived one might say also that it was £360 Million ago it represents a a vision of both shell Ando that subsidy production systems will be part and parcel of our business in the years to come I'm sure we would all join together in Wishing the project God spe [Applause] [Music] this is the UMC the underwater manifold Center in just a few days time it'll be down on the bottom of the North Sea but it carries no crew for it is in effect a giant robot and from its seabed location over the next 25 years it'll produce billions of gallons of oil entirely by remote control [Music] [Applause] back there in Rotterdam John Jennings spoke of a project that spanned 8 years and uh 360 million pounds actually the story goes back much further than that in 1968 Exxon established a team in California to develop a means of producing oil in deep water we knew at the time that eventually we were going to have to produce oil in uh water depths beyond the depth of uh platform capability the uh out of that effort came the the SPs or this submerged production system this unit was installed in the Gulf of Mexico in 1974 and was tested for approximately 5 years to prove the concept and uh capability to reach into these deep water deps [Applause] this sub SE production system was exxon's answer to the problem of developing oil and gas fields in deep Waters but why go to the effort of putting all this down on the seabed beyond the reach of human hands as oil was discovered in deeper waters bigger platforms had to be built huge structures in concrete and steel were being installed in the North Sea and elsewhere some like this one as tall as a 30-story building even on their side eventually there comes a point where it's really not feasible to build them any bigger so instead you put some of those facilities right down on the seabed itself 5 years of testing showed that such systems would work in doing so it encouraged the search for oil in deeper waters previously considered [Laughter] [Music] inaccessible but it was not only Deep Water Production that concerned oil companies their exploration efforts in the 60s and70s had discovered many smaller fields in relatively shallow Waters closer in Shore the however often it was just not economic to build a conventional platform to develop these small or awkwardly shaped reservoirs a new approach was needed here in brit shell developed this small remotely controlled well first used in the shallow Seas of brunai called a satellite well it sits on the seabeds connected to a conventional platform some distance away this way it provides a relatively inexpensive means of reaching parts of the field too small to justify a complete full scale platform so in the early '70s shell with these satellite Wells and Exxon with their submerged production system were each absorbed in sub sea technology here in Britain's North Sea Shell was already in joint venture with exxon's European counterpart ESO successfully developing oil and gas Fields so in 1974 the two decided to pool their experience and produce a subsea production system for use in the North Sea and in this part of the world being down on the seabed would keep it well away from weather like this Southwest five increasing 6 or seven perhaps scale eight later rain at times John Jennings again we decided to go sub sea because it was really a natural development from our earlier experience in the Far East we saw here in the North Sea uh a whole range of new prospects many of them small fields in uh what we now come to know as conventional water depths say down to 500 ft we saw also prospects emerging in somewhat deeper water and we saw the need and opportunity to create a new production system which could be used for both sorts of field the field chosen for this first installation was shell os's Coran field 450 km north east of abedine we chose to apply the UMC to the corand field uh for very practical reasons we have two platforms there and we can't reach all the oil from those platforms because the field is a very long narrow field and so corand the central corand became a natural place to put the UMC to its first test cheat engineer Don Henry the design which took four years was based to a certain extent on the Exxon SPS development work which was for a three- well template the moneyall center however is a 9W template and in addition to the expertise brought in by Exxon there was the additional expertise brought in from brunai by shell personnel which allowed the moneyold center to be not just template Wells but a combination of template and satellite wells in all the team spent some three years on the design work by 1978 the team's designs on paper were being translated into steel here at the fabrication yard in Holland the underwater manifold Center as high as a four-story building and big enough to cover half a football pitch it would certainly be the most advanced piece of equipment ever launched in the North Sea on its seabed location the UMC acts as a template that means that Wells are drilled through it from a surface vessel some 170 m above the drill string goes down through the UMC to reach the oil bearing structures over 10,000 ft below drilling can also be deviated to tap the reservoirs at distances up to 1 and A2 km away to tap parts of the reservoirs even further away up to 4 km satellite Wells are used they are drilled from the surface in the same way as the template Wells then each completed well is capped by what is called a Christmas tree of Al oil flows up through the Christmas tree and through pipelines to the UMC where it joins oil from the other Wells from here it flows to the corant alpha platform some 7 km away corant Alpha is in effect a giant pumping station which after initially treating the oil sends it ashore by pipeline the platform also pumps treated water down to the UMC to maintain the natural pressure in the reservoir and keep the oil flowing it goes via water injection Wells and down into the reservoir at its peak the UMC will be producing up to 2 million gallons of crude oil every day during those 25 years on the seabed it will have to be accessible for maintenance and servicing yet one of the umc's design requirements was that it must be capable of working in depths far greater than these and far beyond the reach of divers this gave the engineers their greatest Challenge and this was their answer a remote maintenance vehicle quite remarkable piece of engineering first used by Exxon in the Gulf of Mexico and here being tested in the dry on the UMC itself in Holland in practice when it's needed it's taken offshore by this vessel once the vessel's over the UMC it sends down a signal this releases a boy which brings a line up to the surface using this line the maintenance vehicle descends to the UMC landing on a track running through its Center it's then remotely controlled by an operator back at the surface in this rehearsal he's moving it along the track to the unit that needs to be inspected or replaced on its Mission the RMV is able to perform a number of tasks here it's actually performing a valve changing operation something it might be called upon to do in the future in water over 1,000 ft deep but there are some essential tasks that even the RMV is unable to perform deep within the UMC and the wells themselves there are valves to be serviced and surveys to be carried out to do this work the engineers use what they call the through flow line or tfl system these are Precision Tools AR Ed in a string each one is individually shaped with the accuracy of a key to carry out a specific function they have fed into the system at the platform end and pumped down fluid filled lines to the UMC a round trip of perhaps over 20 km they enter the UMC here and are then routed to where they need it their tasks vary from servicing Safety Systems to carrying out surveys right down inside a well itself with such Reliance on equipment it was important to put every single item through its PES a period of intensive testing as thorough as that on any space program was begun in 1980 as part of that test program a single satellite well the P1 was placed in the field and connected to corant Alpha although P1 was a test well it would also recover oil from that part of the reservoir not reached by corant alpha or the UMC it was however primarily an opportunity to test the technology involved in this new type of underwater work over the next 18 months the successful results of the land testing and the highly reliable operation of the P1 well confirmed that the UMC was ready for launch and that's where we came in with the departure of the UNC from Holland [Music] the early hours of May the 18th 1982 the crane barge hermod Waits on location we have one bill gamage project team engineer that children will be checking immediately I think we made uh 1 to 2 hours but we should be able to tell you probably within 30 or 40 minutes after we're on board that you can begin balting operations okay well I'll tell you what to do then I got the welders over there got the rigers over there got a lines laid out everything riged up and we just wait for award for you if you tell Rob which is on the barge yeah that you check out is perfect so we can start basting that uh P2 into P5 and we can start cutting the C f it [Music] up the weather was perfect the sea almost flat and midor likee the UMC centerpiece of a 360 million pound project starts the first stage of its Journey to the seabed the engineers were pleased the launch itself was how about as we expected it didn't di as deep as the calculation said it was very much like the SP SPS our previous experience so didn't even go under waterer all the way very good all the way and now it's coming alongside because we get this uh line on a lot of the most tedious part is going to be over it looks like the weather is is calm enough that we're not going to have enough hook motion to give us any problems with lowering so I look for the rest of it to be as uneventful as this it's been a piece of cake what you see there now is the way project manager Tom B perfect it's uh within half a meter on all sides uh with our predictions that were uh calculated by computer and uh really we couldn't couldn't have expected anything better than this uh the next uh thing that's going to happen is that they're going to attach these uh large white n on slings uh to the 500 T hook and uh then once they got that in the hook they'll start bising and trimming making sure that everything thing is perfectly power computers are fine at making predictions but it's men that have to struggle with the hardware now they can begin flooding the buoyancy tanks to take the UMC down to the [Music] seabed they followed its progress on closed circuit TV pictures obtained from remotely controlled cameras dep in the bottom that should be the now came the task of Landing it accurately on the seabed down here transp window had already been laid they sent out signals to guide the UMC accurately onto the target area [Music] [Music] [Music] 12 hours after launching the UMC all 2,000 tons of it touched down on the seabed stirring up the silt they've actually placed it within 1 M of its Target they are justifiably pleased oh very good that's a good oh smes all the way now it really worked good very satisfied customers now the UMC has to be plumbed in connected to its parent platform coronate Alpha to do so the team employed a somewhat unusual technique what you see there is a length of pipeline floating just beneath the surface it's one of a number of pipe bundles that had been assembled on land here at wick on the northeast Scottish Coast [Music] each line consists of almost 4 km of pipe made up into a single [Music] string there were a number of unique aspects to this system not least the design which involved placing pipes within pipes oil and throughflow lines are placed inside steel pipes which are packed with insulating material these lines are placed inside even larger steel pipelines to provide protection down on the seat bed finally like some Modern cleopatras needle the whole 4 km length is towed off the beach and out to sea not far from this beach at Wick Harbor other lines were being prepared electric cables and hydraulic control lines resembling a giant garden hose they were wound onto reels and drums aboard the vessels that would take them to Sea out on the field they're Unwound onto the seabed down here work that in the past might have needed divers was being done by small remote controlled Vehicles just a few years ago this would have been considered science fiction these mechanical insects fuss around the UMC clearing debris cutting cables and attaching wires and the cameras watch it [Music] all all of the umc's functions are controlled remotely at the surface aboard corant Alpha this is the main control panel for the UMC and on it it contains Valves and pressure points to monitor the pressure subc and the valve positions they are laid out in a mimic fashion that corresponds to the layout of the UMC itself from here we can open and close valves by the push buttons and also monitor subsy pressures simply by pressuring the pressure indicators the alarm and shutdown panel alerts the operator to any platform related alarms and if it is necessary he can instantly shut down the UMC the first well was ruled throughout the winter of 1982 and by the spring the first Christmas tree was being installed lowered through the center of the drilling [Music] vessel now first oil was just four weeks away the headlines Michael fut spends the day wooing voters in the West Midlands the world's most advanced underwater Sy oil is now flowing from the world's most advanced underwater production is a unique production system and what makes it so different from the project has G very well indeed considering that it is probably the most advanced underwater project that has been executed in the world and taking the fact that it is been executed in one of the worst weather areas in the world in the North Sea I think the project team have a lot to be proud of I think it's enormously important and we have a technology which can both develop the smaller oil and gas field in conventional water depths depths down to say 600 ft as well as having a technology which can bring us into much deeper water water over 1,000 ft deep uh and for Shell Expo of course that means that we shall be in a position to take advantages of this technology in developing some of our new prospects here in the North Sea unlike the corant alpha platform UMC hides its light 170 M below the surface [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] it represents a revolution in underwater oil and gas production although here it's installed in 500 ft of water the basic design can be modified to work in much greater depths 2,000 ft or more it has shown the way towards future oil field of development in deeper waters and in conjunction with floating production systems a giant leap for mankind was how the pioneers of deep space described their success down here the Pioneers tend to view their work a little more modestly perhaps the last word should go to one of them Tom Jers it's just another step in a long chain of events that have to all operate successfully then if we can continue at this pace for another 20 years we've met our objectives [Music] [Applause] l [Applause]