First Oil

Technology is the grease that helps accelerate the forward progress of our oil and gas industry. If, however, a specific technology fails, related operations often come to a grinding halt. Several recent technological achievements and one failure, both monumental and minute, help illustrate this phenomenon.

Taking tight turns in Avenza. For the Chevron-operated Gorgon LNG project on Barrow Island, GE Oil & Gas is building nine gas turbines to supply 650 MW of electricity for LNG liquefaction. Since Barrow Island is a Class A nature reserve, the turbines are built at GE’s manufacturing plant in Massa, Italy, and assembled as modules at a construction yard in Avenza to minimize the field work on the island that has a fragile ecosystem. Each module is 48 x 22 x 28 m and weighs 2,300 tons, equivalent to four A380 airplanes. In October 2012, the first of these turbine modules was loaded onto a customized freighter for the long journey to Australia.

While the distance from Avenza construction yard to the docked freighter is only 500 yards, the move required a monumental technology effort to navigate the narrow road in the foothills of the mountains. According to GE, “it took the module 4.5 hours to cover the short distance between the GE plant and the Marina di Carrara port. The behemoth rolled, centipede like, on 578 computerized wheels attached to four self-propelled transporters. At one point, the module hugged a residential complex, so close, that a quarter would have been too fat to pass between them.”

Twisting and turning in Neptune Quay. Unlike GE’s Avenza construction yard, Bridon’s new wire rope facility is built on the Neptune Quay waterfront in England. A good thing, too, because a spool of the latest generation of multi-strand wire rope being manufactured at Neptune Quay can weigh up to 600 tons. Bridon’s rope legacy goes back to 1789, when the legacy company started making ropes from natural raw fibers, such as jute. A first-hand look at Bridon’s steel wire drawing facility in Doncaster, wire rope plant in Neptune Quay and the newly established R&D Centre, also in Doncaster, revealed to me how much technology has evolved over the last 200 years.

Before raw steel can be drawn into wire, it has to be processed through several steps, including cleaning, heat treating, and galvanization. At the Neptune Quay factory, up to 45 bobbins of steel wire are fed into a strander that can turn at up to 600 rpm to create a strand. Then, up to 24 bobbins of strands are fed into a closer to manufacture multi-strand rope of up to 250-mm in diameter for applications such as heavy offshore lifting and deepwater mooring. A rope may appear inconsequential in the big scheme of offshore projects, but recall that while towing the Kulluk drillship recently offshore Alaska, there was a mechanical failure of the tow shackle, and the towing rope actually broke, when the disabled cruise liner Triumph was being brought back from offshore Mexico to Mobile, Alabama.

Screwed by a bolt. Continuing the discussion of how minor technology failures can lead to major disasters, consider the situation in the Gulf of Mexico, where the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) issued a safety alert in early February, stating that bolts connecting BOPs to other subsea equipment manufactured by GE Oil & Gas, needed to be inspected and replaced due to possible cracks as a result of improper manufacturing techniques. So, a seemingly simple bolt, probably manufactured by a vendor at the bottom of the supply chain, temporarily shut down operations at 24 rigs, each of which is operating on a multi-million dollar day-rate contract.

Moral of the story? Technology turns the modern world and everything in it, big and small. Attention to detail in all aspects technology development and quality control are key requirements of every system, every unit and every component. There are neither easy turns nor quick short cuts.