Highlights of the Week

Subsea World News has put together a recap of the most interesting articles from the previous week (October 6 – October 12).

Chiyoda Corporation, Xodus Group and Saipem International BV, a subsidiary company of Saipem Spa, have joined forces to set up a subsea engineering company named Xodus Subsea.

Xodus Subsea plans to challenge the largest tier-one subsea engineering companies for a share of the global market. Xodus Subsea will be headquartered in London and have a presence in several cities across Europe, Africa, the Americas, Middle East and Asia Pacific including eight dedicated engineering centres in priority energy locations.

Xodus Subsea engineering services will bring together Xodus Group’s front end engineering capability, Saipem’s turnkey engineering, procurement, construction and installation project experience and Chiyoda’s project management capability of large scale international projects.

Wintershall has awarded its first significant subsea contract for Maria development to FMC Technologies’ Norwegian subsidiary FMC Kongsberg Subsea AS. The value of the contract is approximately NOK 1.8 billion ($280 million ).

The frame agreement with FMC Technologies will first be used to source and build a comprehensive subsea production system for Wintershall’s Maria development in the Norwegian Sea.

Under the proposed development solution the Maria field would be linked to the already existing infrastructure nearby via a subsea tie-back. Based on this plan, the Maria field would be connected with the producing platform Kristin, Åsgard and Heidrun via two subsea templates.

Ezra Holdings Limited’s Subsea Services division, EMAS AMC, has finalised three contracts with Noble Energy valued collectively at over US$300 million.

The scope of work includes engineering, procurement, construction and installation of subsea tie-backs for the Big Bend, Dantzler and Gunflint field developments in the US Gulf of Mexico.

The project management, engineering and procurement are already well underway from EMAS AMC’s Houston office. Offshore execution is scheduled for 2015, utilising five EMAS AMC offshore construction vessels including the newbuild, ultra-high tension, deepwater reel lay and heavy lift vessel, the Lewek Constellation.

Nautronix, a provider of through water communication and positioning technology to the offshore industry, has secured an order to supply NASNet®, an underwater positioning system for Subsea 7.

The system will be used on the Aasta Hansteen field, which is located in the northern part of the Norwegian Sea approximately 300km west of Bodø, at 1,300m water depth. The field is developed by Statoil.

Nautronix will be supplying 16 Large Stations and 4 complete vessel systems which will go on hire in March 2015 for approximately 200 days and will be deployed for the first time in Norwegian waters where the water depth is significant and the weather conditions can be challenging.

The subsea sector is reportedly set to quadruple in size, with projected annual revenues of £85bn by 2020. Currently 45% of the UKCS production comes from subsea wells and one of the key challenges is to increase the use of subsea tie-backs to existing installations.

To increase the ability to react to this growth a new DNV GL subsea team has been created.

The creation of the new subsea section comes on the back of the announcement in August by DNV GL at Offshore North Seas (ONS) when a new ‘Standard for certification of subsea equipment and components’ was launched.