Previous to MSE’s involvement, production of the South Morecombe field fell nearly 20% from around 7,600 million cubic meters to around 6,200 million cubic meters over a three-year period.
Following the implementation of MSE’s recommendations and a compressor redesign, production increased in the fourth year to around 8,000 million cubic meters. This represents an increase of 25% over the prior year 6% over the first year’s figure.
Production from the offshore gas production platform was constrained by a mismatch between the compressor and the engine speeds, which limited the maximum power available from the engine.
Removing one impeller from the compressor casing allowed the compressor speed to be increased and full engine power to be realised. The changes were implemented within 12 weeks.
These relatively small changes to the compression system resulted in a big improvement in performance with low investment compared to the installation of a new system.
Subsequently MSE was retained to carry out a feasibility and conceptual design of an onshore compression system. The continued reservoir decline indicated that there was insufficient installed power offshore to maintain production levels; an onshore compression system was chosen to supplement the platform's compression capability.
With the assistance of MSE’s proprietary software, we challenged the original design concepts and proved that a more operationally flexible design would give better performance.
The contractors, Brown & Root also retained MSE to work on the detailed engineering design and FEED study.
