The requirements for control and monitoring of a subsea field change during its typical 20 – 30 years of life. This presentation addresses impacts of new technology and new solutions that can be implemented during the life of field, solving challenges related to ageing of legacy systems and the need for new functionality.

We will identify key life of field challenges experienced with production controls in existing fields, and how many of them were solved.

Areas that will be addressed includes:
How we have been able to leverage the increased reliability of modern electronic components, while maintaining compatibility with previous generation systems.

How the new electronics positively affected system reliability through improved design, production process, test philosophy and component selection. The result has been an 8 times reliability improvement between generations of subsea electronics.

How new electronics can offer both increased processing power, more sophisticated interfaces and a communication link that is both backwards compatible and support greater subsea communication speed which offers a “seamless” upgrade possibility.

How new electronics may also lead to increased power consumption and options to mitigate the effects through active power management to still allow use in brownfield application are described.

Finally, challenges with- and solutions for interfacing legacy topside with different generations subsea controls in parallel in the same field are presented.