subsea-chapter17 1 Norway’s subsea teamwork Kristin Øye Gjerde and Arnfinn Nergaard The 50th anniversary of the first commercial discovery on the NCS falls in 2019. Over this half-century, underwater technology has made rapid strides. From importing US solutions, Norwegian suppliers have become substantial exporters to the world market in their own right. And after an apprenticeship in the 1970s and 1980s, Norway’s operator companies became some of the leading users of subsea facilities in the 1990s. Knowledge and expertise have been acquired in a small community characterised by great enthusiasm. The first phase of this development, in particular, has often been termed the “engineers’ sandpit”. On a learning curve abroad As we have seen, underwater technology emerged in the USA. Just at the right time before oil exploration began on the NCS, Cameron Iron Works developed the first complete subsea drilling system in 1962 for use in the Gulf of Mexico and off California. Such a solution differed from the traditional approach by moving a well’s mechanical barriers from the rig deck to the seabed – in other words, a subsea wellhead and a BOP with riser and control package. The next step, after petroleum had been discovered in Ekofisk during the autumn of 1969, was underwater production. If a well could be drilled subsea, an Xmas tree could be installed on it. That yielded a complete seabed production facility. The technology again came from the USA. This method of getting on stream early was tied back to Norway’s first production platform, the Gulftide jack-up rig on Ekofisk. Oil, gas and water travelled a short distance through flowlines from four seabed wells and up to the platform deck for separation into their different components. The gas was then flared and the crude shipped away by tanker. But underwater production systems were not utilised on the fixed installations built for Ekofisk and discoveries like Valhall. These fields lay in fairly shallow water and were exploited using several relatively small steel platforms where the well was “extended” to the deck. Wellheads, BOPs and Xmas trees were therefore dry. Norway’s inexperienced oil companies, Hydro and Statoil, and Norwegian suppliers such as KV, nevertheless understood that subsea technology would be important for the future. They sent their employees out into the world to visit the various companies already involved in this area, particularly in the USA but also in France and the UK. That taught them how things stood at the time. In the later 1970s and during the 1980s, fields in deeper water – such as Statfjord and Gullfaks – were developed with big concrete platforms. To make them profitable, more of the field’s oil and gas had to be drained by each installation to increase the recovery factor. That was also an important principle for the Norwegian government – resources must not be wasted. Various approaches were pursued to enhance profitability. Directional drilling was one. Wells angled out from the vertical could produce from a larger area than those simply drilled straight down. Another was permanent production from subsea wells. Both methods were utilised, but underwater technology offered the widest reach. The first subsea projects during the 1980s, pursued on North- East Frigg and East Frig with Elf in the lead, revealed the potential. Then came Shell’s Troll studies, which were more extensive and showed that this was something likely to develop strongly in the future. In the late 1980s, Tore Halvorsen at KOS envisaged eliminating platforms and moving processes to the seabed