English - MTU Onsite Energy

Leading international energy companies are spending
heavily on offshore platforms, pipelines and floating
storage vessels.
Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO)
vessels like this store and process oil until tankers
arrive to receive it and transport it to land.
The otherwise tranquil coastal waters off
Brazil bustle with all of the drilling, processing
and transportation activity you would expect in
a country that sits on roughly 11.7 billion barrels
of oil and has taken its place among the world’s
thriving economies.
Six thousand miles to the northeast in the North
Sea, a mammoth drilling platform hovers over
Norway’s Gjoa oil and gas field. Underneath it is
a proven reserve of 1.3 trillion cubic feet of natural
gas and 82 million barrels of oil. Two hundred
miles to the south— just a stone’s throw, really,
in the context of a planet’s surface that’s 70 percent
water— the United Kingdom awaits the
arrival of two new drilling rigs that will produce
three billion barrels off the coast of the Shetland
Islands. And half a world away, preparations are
being made eighty miles off the northwest coast
of Australia to host the largest ultra-deepwater
drilling platforms ever built. Eventually the semisubmersible
rigs will preside over the new
Gorgon Development in the Indian Ocean — and
9.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, the energy
equivalent of 2.25 billion barrels of oil.
The world has never needed more oil and gas
than right now, and the technology and equipment
required to locate, extract and distribute
those fossil fuels from deep offshore fields have
never been in greater demand. In the last 10
years, more than half of new global oil and gas
reserves were discovered offshore. According to
global energy research firm HIS, “Deepwater and
ultra deepwater discoveries are becoming the
dominant source of new reserve additions,
accounting for 41% of total new reserves.” Extracting
oil and gas from the bottom of the world’s
oceans is very different than doing so on land.
But the two tasks do share one defining characteristic:
Neither is getting any easier.
Riding the wave
Given the drilling challenges and current and
projected global demand for fossil fuels, leading
international energy companies like Petrobras,
Chevron, BP, ExxonMobil and others are spending
heavily on offshore platforms, pipelines and floating
storage vessels. It’s a wave of investment in
specialized capital equipment that’s driving offshore
oil and gas output to unprecedented levels.
David Oliphant, MTU Global Director of Oil & Gas
Sales and Sales Engineering, says the wave
reflects significant changes in offshore energy
production techniques over the last few years.
“Traditional deepwater platforms are being joined
offshore by new methods and equipment to drill,
process and store oil and gas, such as semi-submersible
platforms, drill ships and FPSOs (floating,
productions, storage and offloading units).
Contractors are now working in deeper water
more frequently, and we have powerful engines
that meet their needs. It’s a whole new game,”
he adds.
Conventional drilling platforms are gigantic floating
rigs that are partially constructed on land,
towed far out to sea and eventually secured in
place over a deepwater oil or gas field. But as demand
for energy has grown, new offshore drilling
and processing technologies have been developed
to keep pace. MTU has kept stride with that
evolution, according to Robert Wagner, Senior
Manager Oil & Gas, MTU Friedrichshafen GmbH.
“Customers rely on our high quality, reliable
equipment. We work very closely with our customers
and their contractors at the early stage of
each project, and provide technical and commercial
information for effective project planning,”
Wagner explains. The benefits of this approach
are clear. The earlier that MTU is involved in the
planning process for an offshore energy project,
the better the results will be for the contractors
who build and operate the equipment utilized,
and for the energy company funding the projects.
Breakthrough in Brazil
Engevix (Florianopolis, Brazil), a major shipyard,
purchased sixteen generators powered by MTU
16V 4000 P83 diesel engines last May. Two generators
each will be installed aboard eight FPSO
vessels operated by Petrobras, Brazil’s multinational
energy corporation and the largest company
in Latin America by market capitalization.
20 I MTU Report 01/12