The industry has standardized, simplified and reduced the size of equipment in recent years, but a further step-change is needed to drive a sustainable future for the subsea industry and the world it serves.

With Aker Solutions’ intelligent subsea approach, the time it takes to generate optimal subsea field layouts can be cut by 75 percent and the cost of field development capex can be halved. Accelerated field development is achieved by combining Aker Solutions’ modular, optimized and configurable subsea equipment with automated design which can reduce engineering hours by up to 70 percent.

Intelligent Subsea addresses the current and future needs of subsea production by combining three core value propositions:

Adopting an integrated approach to field design where both the subsea and topside systems are optimized and concepts can be rapidly developed with the aid of advanced digital tools
Standardized and digitally-enabled products that can be rapidly configured to customers’ needs and are delivered with accelerated timelines – reducing the time to first production
Maximized life of field performance with enhanced recovery and extend field life enabled by condition monitoring, predictive maintenance and simplified system enhancement as the field matures
“Digitalization of our work process and new applications are transforming field design, radically accelerating development and delivering actionable insight to maximize performance through the life of a field,” said Aker Solutions Chief Executive Officer Luis Araujo. “Our system thinking and intelligent solutions are a revolution in subsea developments. Intelligent Subsea is enhancing recovery, saving cost and increasing value through life of field.”

“With our industry-leading all-electric and subsea gas compression technology, we extended the frontier for subsea production. We believe Intelligent Subsea will set a new frontier for customer value in projects around the world,” said Araujo.

Integrated Design

Aker Solutions’ system thinking approach delivers integrated field designs where subsea production is part of a complete optimized system.

Our digitally-enabled front-end engineering design enables the rapid development of field concepts with options to optimize for schedule, cost, production or carbon efficiency. Changes to the subsea system are seen in the context of corresponding efficiencies in topside facilities and wider infrastructure to ensure the most efficient design possible.

This approach has been proven to maximize production, reduce operating costs, increase safety and reduce the carbon footprint of operations.

Challenging Convention with Digitally-Enabled Design

Digitally-enabled design helps us drive efficiency and standardization in our design processes to rapidly create, test and adjust design concepts, with each field development proposal costed.

Our combination of engineering knowledge, digital twin capability and advanced digital front-end engineering tools provides a unique solution to field design.

Our digital tools can reduce project timelines from months to minutes. Software applications in ix3’s Concept Insight and Engineering Insight portfolios shorten the time it takes to select the best subsea layout by 75%.

Across the Norwegian Continental Shelf we have reduced cost-per-well by more than 40%

Smart, System Thinking

Working in close collaboration with customers from the start, we can rapidly trial multiple scenarios of a full field system allowing every aspect of a design to be challenged until the best result is found. Such early engagement enabled us to reduce cost-per-well on the Norwegian Continental Shelf by 40% be developing an efficient concept, using standardized equipment and processes, configurable system engineering and taking a serial line production approach.

This allowed us to reduce the total development cost of the Johan Castberg development by 50%. It will enable us to lower development capex and opex for a customer in the Barents Sea with a 190 km ultra-long gas system tieback removing the need for a production platform.

Accelerated Development

We reduce time to first oil through standardized design of next-generation modular subsea products and automated engineering.

Automated engineering software, configurable product platforms and standardized hardware components mean we can automate more of our execution and reduce project engineering lead times.

Standardization is showing engineering hour reductions in the order of 60%-70% in some areas, 25% less assembly hours and reduced procurement cost and lead time.

Configurable Products

These kinds of efficiencies are only possible through standard, configurable products. Our latest generation subsea equipment is standardized, smaller, lower cost and simpler – ensuring predictable quality, repeatable volume and accelerated delivery.

More of the execution chain can be automated and project engineering lead times are reduced through standardized equipment. The design is still configurable using a suite of standardized components. For example, our standardized vertical subsea tree can be configured by the flow control module to match field requirements. Our control module is standard but can be configured at a software level. This allows the same products to be used globally by the same customers.

Automation in Engineering

We have achieved significant gains by automating many of our execution processes involving our standard components and platforms.

Our configuration and design automation tool can cut engineering hours by up to 90%

In the case of wellhead systems, we have developed a configuration and design automation tool which can cut engineering hours by up to 90% and lead time by half. The end result is a cost effective, high quality product, reducing the time to first oil.

Maximized Performance

Ensuring maximum sustained performance in subsea energy production is at the heart of Aker Solutions’ Intelligent Subsea offering.

Through digital insight, predictive maintenance, standardized equipment and enhanced oil recovery techniques, we can drive lower operating costs, increased uptime and extended field life.

Enhanced pumping, boosting and all-electric technologies boost recovery and extend the life of the field as reservoir pressure drops and recoverable reserves become harder to reach. Marginal tiebacks with ultra-long tieback distances are made possible by powerful low-cost pump solutions and simplified, modular subsea production systems. We have been able to cut capex by 50% with a pump module solution through reductions in engineering cost and hardware spend.

Technology for Extended Life

Field life is extended and made more effective and efficient through enhanced recovery and predictive maintenance. Operational data is harvested from the sensors, control systems and instruments on our intelligent products and live-streamed to our specialists. We use product expertise, machine learning and artificial intelligence tools to form organized insight, helping us to identify predictive maintenance and production optimization opportunities.

Subsense’s real-time data streams supported a 80% reduction in required vessel and ROV time

By identifying issues early, our teams can reduce downtime and associated costs like rig rentals, as well as make predictive and condition-based monitoring possible for better performance over the life of an asset. For example, condition monitoring analytics from our Subsense app helped identify the root cause of a hydraulic pressure issue on a large subsea field west of Shetland. Subsense’s real-time data streams supported a 80% reduction in required vessel and ROV time, and a potential saving of millions of NOK, because the search area was narrowed down from 26 structures to six.

All of Aker Solutions’ intelligent products are fully digitally enabled and underpinned by our industry-leading Integral data platform.