New Technologies to Extract Natural Gas from North Sea

choi

Géraldine Amiel, Selina Williams and Kjetil Malkenes Hovland, Chilly North Sea Comes Back to Life; New technology is set to liberate natural gas that for 25 years was trapped beneath sea floor. Wall Street Journal, Apr 26, 2013
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 44623628957436.html

Quote:

(a) "The extreme environment meant the standard way of tapping offshore oil since the 1960s, a steel platform on the surface, would have been too risky and costly * * * Total reinforced its drill bits to pierce the hard sedimentary rock above the reservoir, Mr. Minster says. It avoided the stormy surface by locating extraction equipment on the sea bed and will operate it remotely from shore. To overcome the extreme subsea cold, the company found new insulating materials to sheath pipes that carry gas from the wells to the shore.

(b) "Advanced seismic sensors on the sea floor, providing a clearer image of geological structures than previously possible, will enable Chevron Corp. and its partners to drill more-efficiently targeted wells

(c) "By looking through old seismic surveys with a modern eye, Lundin [Petroleum AB of Sweden] guessed that there was a big undiscovered field in the Utsira High, a geological structure that is one of the most heavily-drilled areas in Norway, he [Hans Christen Rønnevik, Lundin's exploration manager] said.

Note:
(a) Paragraphs 1 and 2 of the report talks about Laggan-Tormore natural gas fields of a French multinational Total SA.
(i) Laggan-Tormore
http://www.laggan-tormore.com/
("Located approximately 125km north-west of the Shetland Islands, the Laggan and Tormore fields * * * lie in an area known generically as West of Shetland")

In the lower right corner of this home page, please click "Location, Location, Location; Laggan-Tormore field map."

(ii) Subsea Production
http://www.laggan-tormore.com/subsea-production
(HOME > TECHNOLOGY > DRILLING; "Huge challenges were overcome to install the templates – built by FMC in Norway – in 600m of water, more than 140km offshore")

(b) FMC Technologies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMC_Technologies
(table: Headquarters Houston, Texas; Founded  1928 (as "Food Machinery Corporation"))