Variable Shunt Reactor Control for Voltage Compensation for Submarine Cable at Offshore Facility

This paper presents the design of a shunt reactor controller (SRC) that provides voltage stability at an offshore and onshore oilfield with a gas and oil separation plant (GOSP) having 90 km submarine cables with different cross sections. There are a total of six shunt reactors (four sets at the 230 kV onshore substation and two sets at the offshore substation). The SRC also coordinates with a utility (UT) transformer tap control to avoid hunting. In addition, the SRC avoids submarine cable overloading. The paper discusses control philosophy, stepwise methodology, energization, and de-energization sequence for various loading and unloading conditions. The paper also covers different methodologies used to finalize the SRC philosophy to develop the band control strategy and discusses the load-shedding implementation to avoid overloading on submarine cables and UT transmission lines. The SRC and load-shed control system has been tested and validated using hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation to reduce commissioning challenges.