In one of the central NCS fields the main FPSO and infrastructure is suffering severe issues from excess produced water. This is a common problem to most mature area development on the NCS/UKCS. This excess water is hampering the overall profitability by filling up the FPSO processing system and taking up a large part of the capacity in the pipeline infrastructure. The result is loss of new revenue opportunities from failure to onboard new fields, increasing operating expenditures, and in general non-optimum production philosophy for the area development.

With new and more efficient subsea processing technology such as the Dual Pipe Separator system (DPS), operators can remove the produced water at the seafloor before releasing it to sea or injecting in a reservoir, and thus enable new business development opportunities. Removing the water at the seafloor, the operators will gain from increased oil recovery due to a reduced back pressure on the reservoir and accelerated production from existing and new reservoirs.

The DPS technology is based on using a pipe separator principle with a set of inclined pipes in parallel, making the solution scalable to both capacity, reservoir pressure and water depths. Since the DPS consists of a number of inclined pipes in parallel, the number of pipes can be adjusted to the capacity requirement. We will present a case study from a real NCS field where the DPS system will be integrated with already existing infrastructure to achieve significant IOR and open up the pipeline for new developments.