LONDON: Oil equipment supplier Plexus is finalising a piece of subsea kit that should revolutionise production of oil and gas from reservoirs under high pressures and temperatures, Chief Executive Ben van Bilderbeek said.
Developed in partnership with oil companies including Shell, Total and Eni, the subsea wellhead — a tap controlling flow on an oil well — will be ready for testing by the middle of next year.
The company is funding the project alone and will keep all connected patents but the input from oil majors means the product can be honed to their needs.
Plexus is part of a trend of smaller innovators, such as Norway’s Ziebel and ExproSoft, looking to meet the challenges of producing oil and gas from conditions where temperatures hit 150 degrees Celsius and pressure exceeds that in the chamber of a firing pistol.
Data for high pressure, high temperature (HPHT) wells is hard to find as drill data tends not to distinguish, but these conditions increasingly accompany big oil finds in places like the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea and offshore Brazil. Van Bilderbeek, 65, said the move into HPHT had levelled the playing field in a sector typically dominated by a few big players and, in doing so, revitalised his business.
The subsea wellhead will use an engineering system Plexus developed over 15 years ago but which has struggled to find broad acceptance in the industry.
“I’m not critical about the way things were done in the past, but when I came up with a solution the industry stiff-armed me,” van Bilderbeek said in an interview in London. “They said we invented problems to sell solutions.”
Now Plexus is at the table. “On something cutting edge like HPHT the operators are happy to try something new.”
Plexus has seen profits grow seven fold since 2010 as the company’s surface wellheads, using its patented POS-GRIP system, have become widely used for exploration wells in the North Sea.
The POS-GRIP system works from the ‘outside in’ by squeezing the wellhead body onto the device that supports the pipe going into the ground using hydraulics.
reuters
