Bonded flexible pipe

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of bonded flexible pipe improvements primarily driven by environmental safety as applied to offshore development using mobile production systems. Bonded pipe is a flexible pipe where the steel reinforcement is integrated and bonded to a vulcanized elastomeric material. Textile material is included in the structure to obtain additional structural reinforcement or to separate elastomeric layers. The applications addressed by this paper are sweet service production, including well stream product and stabilized crude export. Production products include gas, water and injection chemicals. The bonded flexible pipe is used as static flowline and dynamic risers and loading and discharge marine hose. A new application for bonded flexible pipe that did not require much in the way of new technological development is offshore mobile production systems. Until 1989 there had been very little new development in bonded flexible pipe but with the introduction of offshore mobile production systems (MOPS) this changed. The mobile offshore production systems considered is the MOPS used on the Gombe Beta Field, Gabon, West Africa and the MOPS used on the Tchatamba Field, also offshore Gabon, West Africa. The MOPS is accepted in the oil industry as a means to collect reservoir data through extended well tests, to provide early cash flow from major fields and to produce marginal fields. The author focuses on bonded flexible risers, bonded flexible pipelines and bonded floating export hose that comprise the three critical bonded flexible pipe applications. All three are used to convey crude between the production unit, storage tanker and export tanker.