Control Unit for All-electric FSC actuator

Today, valves on subsea wells are controlled by actuators with hydraulics, supplied and controlled from a platform through umbilicals. In case of a shutdown, the hydraulic pressure drops, and the valves are forced to a closed position by mechanical springs installed on the valves. Subsea systems are now being placed deeper and further away from topside-based processing plants. This requires longer umbilicals, larger topsides, larger mechanical springs, and increased hydraulic volumes stored subsea. This means increased investment costs, making some field developments not commercially attractive (marginal fields). Adding new wells to existing infrastructure (tie-ins) also becomes more complex and costly with hydraulics. Moreover, hydraulics will not support digitized monitoring and individual control of valves, which, if implemented, would have improved production-volumes, uptime and safety. The industry is therefore increasingly focused on finding electrified solutions for subsea development. Aker Solutions with partners are developing an electrical system with batteries replacing mechanical springs, and with a new control system that will improve monitoring, reliability, response time, flexibility, and cost. This electrical solution will make subsea oil and gas production safer, more energy efficient, more cost efficient, give higher uptime, and produce larger volumes than a comparable hydraulic solution. Throughout this project with Forskningsrådet support, Aker Solutions has achieved technology maturity level 4 according to API 17Q which is endorsed and recognized by our JIP partners (future clients for the technology application) TotalEnergies, Equinor and Wintershall. A comprehensive and extensive test program has been established and completed to prove the technology maturity including several simulations of subsea applicable scenarios. With this achievement, the control unit technology for All-Electric actuator is currently qualified for upcoming Oil & Gas subsea prospects. In a short-term there are several prospects in the Norwegian Continental Shelf that will request the technology to be considered as part of the tender processes. The next step is to raise further the technology maturity level by testing it in a XT Pilot, which is an ongoing project. The expectation is to achieve TRL5 with the completion of this project.

All-Electric technology for subsea application is a promising game change to the industry which will enhance product reliability, availability and improve field maintenance programs. Throughout the condition monitoring capabilities that this technology allows, operators will get to know more data from subsea, not only related to the process itself, but also related to the hardware condition, resulting in smarter and more predictable intervention campaign. These features available with the All Electric technology will have a positive impact on a up timing, operational costs and will also contribute for CO2 emissions reduction. With the current achieved result, the Control Unit for All Electric FSC Actuators can be considered in future tenders. Aker Solutions has delivered studies and currently is working on a tender that considers this technology as a high potential for an upcoming subsea project. The control unit will also be used to run system tests as part of an ongoing JIP that aims to test a Pilot XT with All Electric technology.

More stringent requirements for SPS systems is pushing the industry to replace hydraulics with an all-electrical actuator system. Such a system shows merit of being better by reducing size/weight/cost while increasing flexibility and uptime. Aker Solutions' underlying idea to achieve these benefits is to 1) use electrical motor; (2) use battery; (3) use distributed and smart controls on each valve to enable real-time monitoring, better valve control, and flexible adding of new components; and (4) make the distributed controls retractable and replaceable to allow cost efficient system upgrades. The all-electric actuator system consists of a mechanical driveline and a controls unit. In DEMO project 296653 we prototyped and tested a stand-alone mechanical driveline. This project is to prototype a control unit for this drive that is also applicable for other drives, thus a stand-alone product. The objective is to qualify and test a distributed and smart controls system, operating on individual valves, replacing a costly control module with a simpler one, for real-time monitoring, better valve control, and flexible adding of new components. The benefits are many: Increased safety and robustness (operate actuators individually), more power (operate actuators simultaneously), increased maintainability (retract/fix/maintain actuators individually), Plug-Play testing (pre-built/pre-tested parts as stand-alone units). This gives higher availability and uptime while lowering cost. For Aker Solutions and partners DEMO funding is crucial; without funding Norwegian engineering and manufacturing jobs are put at risk as we may miss important milestones: the first to establish a cost competitive all-electric solution will have an edge in markets, where the ambition is to have all-electric solutions deployed in 2021. If launch-target is met, Aker Solutions can bring contracts to Norway from a global all-electric market estiamted to 7 BNOK over the next 10 years.