SPE Projects, Facilities & Construction
Volume 6,
Number 2,
June 2011,
pp. 96-103
Summary
Subsea leakages from underwater production facilities may have significant
environmental and economical consequences. There is a wide range of different
technologies available for detection of subsea leakages, depending on the type
of application and approach to leak detection. The two most common approaches
to direct subsea-leak detection are inspection/surveying, where sensors are
attached to mobile units such as remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), and
continuous monitoring, where the sensors are permanently installed at the
seabed. For the latter case, there are several different types of
leak-detection technologies, depending on whether templates or pipelines are to
be monitored. While most subsea facilities are monitored by flow-measurement
devices that can typically detect leaks that are greater than a few percent of
overall flow, this paper addresses direct methods of leak detection suitable
for smaller leaks.
The Norwegian Oil Industry Association (OLF) has initiated a series of
projects on subsea-leak detection to obtain an overview of the different types
of leak-detection systems available and to determine the practical
applicability and functionality of these systems. An important issue in this
regard is to test the leak-detection systems experimentally with both gas and
oil leakages under realistic conditions. This paper presents results from
comparative, experimental tests of five different leak-detection systems that
are suitable for continuous monitoring of subsea templates with the goal of
elucidating the strengths and limitations of the different detection
principles.
© 2011. Society of Petroleum Engineers
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History
- Original manuscript received:
13 August 2010
- Meeting paper published:
5 October 2010
- Revised manuscript received:
26 October 2010
- Manuscript approved:
28 October 2010
- Published online:
28 April 2011
- Version of record:
1 June 2011
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