Shell E&P awards Glider field flowline burial contract

By OGJ editors

HOUSTON, Feb. 9 -- Shell Exploration & Production Co., a unit of Royal Dutch/Shell Group, awarded a flowline burial contract to Cal Dive International unit Canyon Offshore Inc., Houston, for further development of Sepco's Glider field on Green Canyon Block 248 in the Gulf of Mexico.

The contract includes trenching and backfill burial of the 32,000 ft, 6.625-in. (about 8 in. OD) Glider flowline in 3,000 ft of water at the Brutus tension leg platform end, and in 3,300 ft of water at the G4 well location. Working at this water depth, according to Canyon Offshore, makes it the deepest flowline burial project in the world.

The project, now under way, is slated for completion by the end of February. Canyon Offshore will use its T-750 Super-Trencher deployed from the company's new Ulstein UT-745 multiservice vessel, M/V Northern Canyon, to perform the trenching and burial operations. The service firm also will utilize a Triton XLX work-class remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to conduct survey and post burial survey tasks.

Canyon Offshore is contracted to provide all the preengineering, survey, project engineering, project management, and ROV support for the project.

Shell has utilized flowline burial as a flow assurance tool in other projects, such as the Angus burial in 1999. The procedure reduces the amount of required flowline insulation and has been used as an alternative to pipe-in-pipe or bundled flowlines, it said.