Electrical power system challenges during the expansion of offshore oil & gas facilities

Rising development costs for new oil and gas facilities has led many operators to look to maximise the production capability from existing onshore and offshore plants. These projects often include a combination of brownfield and greenfield development - with the target of using as much of the existing infrastructure as possible. For example, as existing wells become depleted, production tails off, and new wells must be drilled for production, water injection or gas lift. Often this requires new wellhead platforms because existing well slots are fully utilised, or they are required to enable drilling to reach other untapped parts of the reservoir. These type of projects present many challenges, especially when the original facilities were designed and built in the mid 1990's in a low oil price market, when the CRINE initiative was hatched. This typically led to minimising facility flexibility and stripping out any allowance for future expansion in order to reduce CAPEX. Many were originally designed for a limited lifetime, and now some of these facilities are the ones being extended and expanded to provide additional production throughput.