Technip has chosen Cabot’s aerogel Compression Pack to insulate a 64 km stretch of four undersea pipe-in-pipe (PiP) flowlines in the North Sea. The systems will be installed in the UK and Norway divisions of the North Sea.
Technip customers for these subsea pipeline projects include BG Group, Statoil, Total and BP and their respective projects are BG Gaupe, Statoil Smorbukk, Total Islay Field Development and BP Devenick.
Cabot Aerogel’s Commercial Director, A.J. du Plessis stated that the subsea project has further emphasized the aerogel Compression Pack as the preferred product for undersea PiP flowlines insulation. He added that the aerogel Compression Pack was preferred by their clients since it can be installed easily and provides excellent insulation.
The aerogel Compression Packs will be supplied to several spoolbases of Technip situated in Evanton, Orkanger and Norway. After insulation, the pipelines will be deployed by the company’s Apache ll vessel using the reel-lay technique. The technique involves unspooling of the lengthy upright pipes in a single uninterrupted length in water depth between 85 and 380 m.
The subsea PiP partnership between Technip and Cabot was started in 2009 with the BP Galapagos Area Development project in the Gulf of Mexico. The Devenick project is equally important since it is the third flow line to be insulated using aerogel Compression Packs, linking the Galapagos project and the Block 31NE offshore Angola.
The partnership of Cabot with Technip for the Islay project involves the first time inclusion of aerogel insulation by an EHT-PiP application. The cables capable of determining electrical heat will run along the entire pipe length between the insulation and the pipeline’s exterior. The novel stretching nature of the aerogel Compression Pack enables the expansion of the aerogel insulation on all sides of the cables and any spaces in a single layer will be filled.
Source: http://www.cabot-corp.com