The PMI team had a busy August having attended the ONS 2018 Conference in Stavanger, Norway. The conference not only provided a chance to connect with industry professionals, government officials, and catch up with clients, but also to learn more about what’s shaking up the market.
Innovation is the name of the game
Cost reduction through innovation was a common theme throughout the conference. More technological breakthroughs and policies are changing, providing the momentum oil and gas (O&G) industries need to continue to grow, evolve, and stay relevant. A number of ONS attendees were exhibiting alternative forms of energy including wind and wave.
One of the hottest topics of conversation was Equinor’s proposed plans to build the Hywind Tampen floating wind park. This park plans to reduce carbon emissions on Equinor’s oil and gas platforms. This kind of project displays some of the innovative ways the oil and gas industry is working to incorporate wind — especially floating wind projects — as a form of energy for offshore platforms. Offshore wind farms in the North Sea may be seeing more floating wind projects in their future.
Market conditions
A lot of discussions were also centered on O&G market conditions as the renewable fuel industries are now some of the fastest growing sectors. From our perspective, the majority of attendees felt there was a slight uptick in the market, but others had a more reserved outlook.
In addition, several seismic companies indicated an increase in activity, while other companies mentioned rounds of layoffs. It may be too soon to tell the ultimate trajectory of these markets, but we’re enlivened to see companies with new forms of energy coming to the table with creative solutions to today’s energy challenges.
PMI has been a key supplier for many companies within the oil and gas market, for nearly half a century. We offer full-service engineering from concept to production and provide cable protection and management systems for oil and gas and renewable energy projects.
While some other suppliers have closed doors, PMI has weathered the swings in market conditions by providing quality cable protection and terminations for our clients’ most demanding applications. This quality is what continues to set us apart from other suppliers.
PMI also stands alone in our low-hassle, no-tools-required cable protection assembly systems. Whereas other products, such as terminations, may require up to 12 hours to cure, PMI’s terminations can be completely assembled and ready to go in just 30 minutes.
Our experience working with projects across all sectors — oil and gas, wind, and wave energy — allows PMI to be an invaluable resource to our clients in all stages of their project development. In a world of tight timelines and budgets, PMI strives to create the cable protection systems that can remove the headaches and wasted time and energy so engineers can focus on their biggest project goals — not get caught up in cable complications. After all, about 80% of all project disruptions come from cable failures.
We’re always excited to attend ONS and it was a great opportunity to connect with some of our current clients and leaders from around the world. (PMI’s team even had the opportunity to meet with the U.S. Ambassador to Norway and mayors of Stavanger Bergen!). We look forward to seeing even more of our clients and connecting with leading industry professionals at several more of this year’s upcoming conferences.
A new ship in the fleet of Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS) suggests low oil prices haven’t closed the spigot of innovation in deep ocean engineering.
A naming ceremony in Nagasaki, Japan, in mid-March celebrated PGS’s acquisition of the Ramform Tethys, a new seismic data acquisition ship that’s brimming with the latest 3D and 4D technology for seismic projects that bounce sound waves off the sea floor to find untapped supplies of crude oil.
Built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Shipbuilding at a cost of $285 million, the Tethys is the third Ramform Titan-class vessel in the PGS fleet; the first two were finished in 2013-2014 and the fourth will come to sea in 2017. Titan-class ships have a distinctive triangular hull that’s 104 meters long and 70 meters wide at the stern — the widest hulls currently at sea, PGS says. The extra-wide stern looks a bit odd on the sea, but it has huge benefits for towing streams of sensor arrays and providing extra stability for the crews scanning the data pouring in from those arrays.
“The Ramform Tethys like her Ramform Titan-class sisters is well adapted to the prevailing economic environment,” PGS says on its website. “Her operational cost per streamer is the lowest around, while the resolution and reliability of the dual-sensor, broadband GeoStreamer data she produces is by far the best currently available.”
The Titan-class ships in the PGS fleet use an impressive amount of underwater cable hardware. The Tethys can carry 24 streamer reels: 16 reels aligned abreast and 8 reels further forward, with capacity for 12-kilometer streamers on each reel. That enables an array with hundreds of thousands of sensors spread over an area of 12 square kilometers — nearly 3,000 acres or more than triple the size of New York’s Central Park.
The new ship makes it faster and easier to deploy and retrieve cable hardware for subsea explorations. That allows surveys to be completed much sooner and ships to stay at sea longer in the calm times between ever-present storms on the high seas. That equals greater efficiencies that can be passed along to PGS clients.
“Productivity, safety, stability and redundancy are the key benefits of these vessels,” said Per Arild Reksnes, executive vice president for operations at PGS, which is based in Norway. “Their ability to tow many streamers gives high data quality with dense cross-line sampling and cost-efficient acquisition with wide tows.”
The Ramform Tethys has six engines producing 26.4 megawatts of power, and carries over 6,000 tons of fuel and equipment. The fact that companies are still buying ships of this size and complexity demonstrates that even with severe economic challenges across the oil sector, people will still see the wisdom of investing in better technology.
Discover how other Oil & Seismic companies are finding ways to save on fuel and cost in our Free Hydrodynamic Efficiency report.
PMI has grown up with the oil industry. In 1969, we emerged in the underwater market by introducing the helical wire concept for use on underwater cables. And today, we offer full-service engineering from concept to production, cable hardware and kits, custom cable systems and simulated at-sea testing services.
The recent trend in oil prices casts a shadow of uncertainty on many industries like ours across the globe. But news of a Norwegian oil field has us all perking up a bit.
The Ministry of Petroleum and Energy has given the go ahead on the development and operation plan of the oil group Statoil for Johan Sverdrup field. It’s the fifth largest oil field to ever be found off the Norwegian cost. And it looks as if it is expected to generate $200 billion in revenues within the next 50 years and create 51,000 direct and indirect jobs, which is especially important for Norway – not to mention the entire oil industry — these days.
Read more about our thoughts on Oil and Gas Exploration.
Read more about Norway’s Development of Largest Oil Field.
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They operate in different markets. Oil is predominantly used for transport—cars, trucks, planes. Very little of it is used for power; oil accounts for less than 1 percent of power generation in the United States and Canada, for example, and not much more in Europe. Globally, the figure is around 5 percent. Renewables, in contrast, are used mostly to create electricity. The more important factor for renewables, then, is not the price of oil, but the price of electricity, and the latter is not entirely a function of the cost of fuel. The electrical grid itself is expensive, which is why US power costs, which are relatively low in global terms (an average of 12 cents per kilowatt-hour), have been rising. In Europe and Japan, electricity costs are significantly higher, and the relative position of renewables is correspondingly better. Read more…
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At PMI, our engineering excellence means our clients receive proven product technologies and processes to deliver ease of installation, long service life, and reduced lead times, allowing them to focus on other tactics for tackling a tough marketplace.
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