UV-SEA - UV water treatment system for sub-SEA factories

The subsea factory concept, being developed by the oil and gas sector's need to develop new cost effective ways of extracting oil and gas reserves. Hence their decision to invest heavily in the development of subsea equipment for enhanced oil recovery.However as many of the subsea factories will be located in deeper waters (up to 3km) and harsher environments it is imperative that equipment can function remotely with little or no maintenance requirements so as to minimise operation and maintenance costs. For example, water-injection systems require filtration using expensive membranes with limited lifetimes (require changing after 6-12 mths at a significant cost per site) and disinfection using biocides which require storage, pumping and injection into the system. Therefore there is a real demand for technological solutions which can help to minimise lifecycle cost (capex and opex) and maintain production up-time. UV-SEA focusses on developing a solution to increase the lifetime of filtration membranes to meet the well site operators requirements and in so doing will significantly reduce capex/opex and maintenance. This will be achieved through the development of a highly disruptive water treatment technology for subsea injection. This has the potential to fundamentally change the industry, massively reducing cost and increasing safety and allowing access to current resources that are currently unviable due to technical reasons such as reservoir depth.