Given the current energy challenges, such as renewable potential, sustainability and low carbon emissions, it is vital that the oil and gas industry prepares itself for the future, to exploit resources in a cost-efficient, carbon-efficient and safe manner. Many of the future developments to tackle these challenges will rely on systems for subsea production and processing, and by leading actors in industry and academia joining forces.
Subsea subsea production and operations have been important for decades, and both countries are at the forefront of this field, with a significant subsea wells on the Brazilian and Norwegian continental shelves. The objective of this consortium has been to enable the development of a sustainable and broad collaboration within subsea operations education, research and development, between leading academic and industrial actors in Brazil and Norway.
Through the current consortium, we have assembled a group of leading subsea actors from both academia and industry. Our Brazilian university partners include the top universities in the country: The University of São Paulo (USP), the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and the University of Campinas (Unicamp). In addition, the companies Petrobras (Brazil), and Equinor (Norway) have been active members of the consortium, as well as GCE Ocean Technology (Norway). At NTNU, BN-SOC Intpart2 is coordinated by the Department of Geoscience and Petroleum (IGP) and has been attached to two Centres for Research-based Innovation – SFI SUBPRO (primary affiliation) and SFI MOVE (sub-project with NTNU in Ålesund and USP).
Activities in BN-SOC have centered around the mobility as a major activity, to facilitate multidisciplinary collaboration. During the project period, the consortium has facilitated approximately 55 reciprocal visits and approx. 8 short-term stays to date, from Norway to Brazil and vice versa. The short-term stays have been instrumental in achieving joint supervision of Master students, in ensuring valuable research exchange for PhD- and Postdoc.-candidates and joint publications of scientific articles and technical reports.
Several journal articles have been published as a result of BN-SOC2 activity, with additional articles currently under production and / or review, as well as approximately 65 additional conference papers and presentations produced.
So far, BN-SOC has hosted three workshops of which two in Trondheim (Norway) and one in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). The consortium has been an active participant group in the "November Conference on Brazilian-Norwegian Energy Research" for several years running, including being responsible for hosting sessions, contributing with presentations, and through NTNU, in the planning of the conference.
The BN-SOC2 program has led to a close cooperation with our Brazilian partners within this field, as well as having been of great value to SFI SUBRO and SFI MOVE. Our cooperation has also led to Brazilian partner involvement in new project application and research programs
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Given the current energy challenges, such as renewable potential, sustainability and low carbon emissions, it is vital that the oil and gas industry prepares itself for the future. To this end, the Brazilian-Norwegian Subsea Operations Consortium (BN-SOC) was established in 2017, following a successful INTPART application in 2016, with leading academic and industrial actors from Brazil and Norway as partners. All the consortium partners from BN-SOC are on-board for the second phase of the project.
Activities of the first phase of BN-SOC have centered around the mobility as a major activity, and the consortium has good results to show for its activities so far. Increased contact with Brazil through BN-SOC has been a valuable supplement to NTNU, particularly to SFI SUBRPO and SFI MOVE, as well as the other consortium members. While contact between BN-SOC's members will continue after project end, the phase 2 financing of the project here proposed will be of central importance, not only to maintain current levels of activity, but to further develop cooperation between Norway and Brazil.
The activities proposed in the project description (attached), and stemming from the objectives stated in this application, all contribute to INTPART's aims to enhance quality in Norwegian education and research, to enhance the link between higher education and research, to develop long-term international partnerships, and to further develop cooperation between academia and industry. A lack of funding at this stage will dissipate much of the consortium’s current momentum and miss the opportunity of a higher state of the art in the subsea field among Brazil and Norway.