GE Water has secured the first order of its seawater sulphate removal technology for the offshore oil and gas industry from Norway’s Statoil.
Statoil selected a consortium led by GE Water and Norwegian thermal energy experts Halvorsen TEC to supply a complete sulphate removal unit (SRU).
The technology is to protect production wells at Statoil’s Johan Castberg project (formerly Skrugard), about 100 kilometres north of Snøhvit field in the Barents Sea, off Norway.
GE Water and Halvorsen TEC will deliver front end engineering design (FEED), working closely with Aker Solutions and Statoil. The FEED work will begin in 2017 and last six months, and equipment will be fabricated and delivered by mid-2019. The first oil is slated for production in 2022.
The SRU will enable Statoil to inject 2,000 m3/h of seawater at less than 20 parts per million sulphate, and less than 20 parts per billion oxygen. The injection capacity will be 1,188 m3/h at 6 bar.
The package includes: GE’s seawater sulphate-reducing nanofiltration membranes; GE’s ZeeWeed 700B horizontal ultrafiltration systems; deoxygenation membrane technology from 3M; and full single-life SRU.
GE Water will further provide a process guarantee, servicing package, and performance monitoring through its InSight platform.
“As offshore exploration and production moves into deeper waters, operators must protect their assets to maximise their return on investment. Sulphate removal is important to help ensure that production assets remain free of barium and strontium scale, which would precipitate if untreated seawater is injected. GE is teaming up with Halvorsen TEC to showcase how SRU technology can help Statoil and other oil and gas producers reduce their costs in increasingly tough-to-treat conditions,” said GE Water president and chief executive, Heiner Markhoff.