Wood Group in next phase of subsea equipment reliability project

Oil and gas services company Wood Group has entered the next phase of a collaborative effort to develop a better understanding of the reliability of subsea equipment for use in offshore Australia.

The Subsea Equipment Australian Reliability Joint Industry Project (SEAR JIP) is an initiative led by Wood Group and supported by a group of operators including Shell, Woodside, INPEX, and PTTEP.

Wood Group said on Thursday that the project is entering Phase IV and will focus on collaboration and knowledge sharing to improve subsea equipment design and reduce the requirement for costly, time-consuming interventions in Australia’s challenging offshore warm water environment.

According to Wood Group, this latest phase of the SEAR JIP will facilitate a ‘lessons learned’ forum, where operators will share experience about equipment performance.

Also, Phase IV will deliver a cloud-based reliability database which will permit the assessment of operators’ equipment performance and comparison of vendors’ performance for equipment installed in Australian waters.

Another goal will be establishing a testing program with two streams. The testing will benchmark the ability of different subsea electrical cable designs to block gas permeation and migration, and test new technologies to identify its effectiveness to prevent marine fouling.

Bob MacDonald, CEO of Wood Group’s Specialist Technical Solutions business, said: “Wood Group has been leading the SEAR JIP since 2014. We are bringing together the broad expertise and experience of subsea operators, vendors and Australian research institutions to stimulate new solutions for the sector’s reliability challenges.

“Also, our subsea business is using our data analytics capabilities to help improve reliability, and we hope to be able to combine these learnings with the SEAR program.”

Adriana Botto, Wood Group’s project manager for the SEAR JIP, added: “The initial phase of the SEAR JIP underlined how important the issue of subsea reliability is and that significant cost savings could be made by mitigating issues with subsea equipment and reducing the requirement for intervention campaigns.

“This latest phase of the project will deepen our understanding of how we can enhance the design of subsea equipment to avoid time-consuming and costly interventions. Harnessing the lessons learned from the SEAR JIP will position us to identify the cause of equipment performance issues so that they can be designed out by vendors in the future.”