The oil & gas industry’s increasing demand lower TOTEX and lower carbon footprint, is driving the need of new subsea solutions. To meet these new demands, the various subsea players have been designing their versions of an All-Electric system.

When seeking a solution that best balanced safety, performance and cost, Aker Solutions came up with an innovative distributed controls system architecture.

In this architecture, the control modules are distributed to each valve, meaning that the fail-safe functionality and safety system is fixed to the valves, and operate independently. This reduced the complexity and dependencies within the safety system, thus minimizing the probability of systematic and systemic failures. Such architecture may be unconventional compared to the centralized electro-hydraulic control system, however the behavior of the system is similar.

In this paper Aker Solutions will present the all electric control system challenging the current perception of subsea control systems, both with regards to the control architecture, safety, operational characteristics and IMR strategies. By embracing the potential of the technology, the safety integrity of the system is maintained due to extensive diagnostic capabilities, low complexity and robust design. Further, the operational flexibility and high reliability combined with predictive maintenance and high maintainability ensures increased availability.

The technology has been developed through a Joint Industry Project with the following partners; Aker Solutions, Norwegian Research Council, Equinor, Total, WintershallDEA and Lundin.