Subsea Production Optimization in Field BC-10 Offshore Brazil

The BC-10 asset, located in deep water offshore Brazil, produces heavy oil in the range of 16 to 24 °API. In this article, two examples of production optimization for this field will be provided (further examples are available in the complete paper).

April 30, 2016

Journal of Petroleum Technology

Fig. 1—Schematic of the entire caisson and ALM (top left); the support structure, 42-in. conductors, and the manifold on top (top right); ALM populated with four MOBOs (bottom right); closeup of the TEA, showing it attached to the 32-in.-inner-diameter caisson; this forms the MOBO (bottom left).

The BC-10 asset, located in deep water offshore Brazil, produces heavy oil in the range of 16 to 24 °API. Mudline caisson separators with electrical submersible pumps (ESPs) are used to process fluids from multiple wells and boost them to the receiving floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessel. There are significant flow-assurance challenges in operating the asset. In this paper, two examples of production optimization for this field will be provided (further examples are available in the complete paper).

BC-10

BC-10’s production comes from four fields located in water depths ranging from 1650 to 1920 m and is dependent on artificial lift. This summary focuses on optimizations involving the Ostra field.

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