The most important advance in subsea boosting may not be a new pump or breakthrough in processing, but improved predictability and reliability.
Technology can make or break a project. Over the decades, operators have refined subsea boosting technology to improve reservoir drainage. An early stepping stone was the commercial deployment of multiphase boosting offshore Norway in the 1990s, follow in the 2000s by deepwater installations and applications for long-distance tiebacks, such as BP’s King project in the Gulf of Mexico, which has since been renamed the Gulf of America. That deployment, then both the deepest subsea booster installation and the longest booster tieback, failed less than a year after startup, prompting BP to pause its use of subsea pumping technology.
Now, bolstered by advances in the technology and lessons learned by the industry, BP is lining up a trio of deepwater projects that rely on subsea pumping technology.
