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The journey towards the realization of the subsea factory is well on its way, promising the benefits of subsea processing and production. This "Grand Challenge" places extreme demands on the reliability, uptime and safety of the technology for distributing, delivery and control of the power system. ABB Oil & Gas is running a Joint Industry project together with Statoil, Total and Chevron to develop technologies for subsea power transmission, distribution and conversion at greater distances, in deeper waters, and in harsher environments. The project started up in 2013 and is targeting a 3000-hour shallow-water system test in 2018, including the qualification of pressure tolerant medium voltage switchgear, medium voltage drives, as well as supporting controls and auxiliary supplies. The project budget is in excess of 100 MUSD, funded by ABB, Statoil, Total, Chevron as well as The Research Council of Norway. The target environment is water depths up to 3000 meters, transmission distances up to 600 km, and power levels up to 100 MW. The project follows the TRL development stages for technology qualification applied to components, sub-assemblies and equipment. This is a systematic approach ensuring that the technology will function reliably within specified limits, and it provides a common understanding and terminology of technology status and risk management. Qualification includes extensive testing of components subjected to test conditions derived from a common understanding of realistic component/equipment specific stresses throughout an agreed life-cycle mission profile, with particular emphasis on learning the behavior and limits of different designs. Comprehensive confirmation of the desired function as well as reliability testing is primarily conducted at the level of the component where a functional failure can be defined and accelerated conditions applied. Further, we perform sub-assembly testing mainly geared toward confirming the overall function, design margins, and the thermal and high-current performance. Formal qualification of key components and sub-assemblies is planned for 2017. Based on qualified components, final prototypes will be assembled in 2018 for a 3000 hour shallow-water endurance test and system demonstration. The project passed a decision gate milestone in April 2015, having verified technology concepts as well as TRL2 for key components. Prototypes under development include full-scale subsea drives and switchgear with supporting controls and LV auxiliaries and functional verifications in key ABB factories. During 2016 key prototype designs have been tested and functionally demonstrated over a limited operating range. This paper provides a summary of the current status of the project highlighting the most critical areas for success, such as designing for modularity and the demanding reliability and availability targets, and utilizing the best experts and experience across ABB as well as the participating oil companies.

For decades, technology development in the marine oil and gas industry has focused on accessing reserves in ever more challenging locations -the Arctic, West of Shetland, in deep waters, in high pressure and high temperature reservoirs and so on. While this trend will certainly continue, economic and environmental concerns, and technology progress are driving efforts to maximize oil recovery, reduce operating and capital expenditure, simplify access and intervention, and extend field life. At the vanguard of this change are advanced subsea systems. Subsea technology has been around for a few decades, but the mission of oil companies is now to put an entire subsea ЉfactoryЉ on the sea floor, with no facilities topside. The technical challenges presented by this quest are formidable, but the payoff is enormous.Title photo text: Locating oil and gas recovery and processing equipment on the seabed and eliminating topside facilities entirely has many advantages. What technology is needed to accomplish it? Shown is a concept for a subsea power hub and distribution.In terms of capital investment, the marine oil and gas industry is one of the top-spending industries in the world. In 2016, global exploration and production expenditure (capex and opex) is expected to be around $465 billion [1].However, oil and gas infrastructure costs money. Usually, subsea wells route a mixture of oil, gas and water to a nearby surface facility, where the mixture is separated into its constituent parts -and the water is often returned to the seabed and re-injected into the rock formations whence it came in order to maintain reservoir pressure. The oil and gas are sent on to the next facility -perhaps hundreds of kilometers distant. The cost of the infrastructure required simply to move these substances around runs into billions of dollars for a medium-sized field.If, however, a good part of the processing -for example, the oil/gas/water separation or gas compression -can be done Љat source,Љ ie, on the seabed, then much of this infrastructure becomes unnecessary. Indeed, if all the facilities can be placed on the seabed, then the requirement for ЉlocalЉ topside facilities vanishes altogether and along with it a huge capex and opex cost /(pic 1). Further, water depth then becomes less relevant and it becomes easier to exploit resources in deep water locations. Not only that but because the surface facilities that remain will be shared by many satellite fields, better utilization can be achieved.

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