Device quick to give accurate water data
This story profiles one of the Offshore Technolog y Conference’s Spotlight on New Technolog y Award winners.
Last year, Schlumberger- owned OneSubsea took home a Spotlight on New Technology award for the world’s first wet gas compressor, and this year it bagged two more, including one for the AquaWatcher water analysis sensor.
The AquaWatcher is a small sensor that uses microwaves to detect and determine the salinity of tiny quantities of unwanted water in multiphase and wet gas flows.
At best, water is an unwanted byproduct of gas production that is tricky to remove. At worst, the salinity can be corrosive to anything it passes through.
“Sometimes the capability to handle water limits overall production,” says Rolf Rustad, subsea measurement domain champion for OneSubsea. “Identifying wells that produce a lot of water is important.”
Operators with realtime information on how much water their wells are producing and what’s in that water can make costeffective decisions to focus on other wells on the same reservoir that are producing less water.
“The challenge in gas production is the water makes a very small portion of the entire production,” Rustad says. “The trick was always trying to measure the weight of water after the fact, but we measure the properties of the water in real time.”
The laundry list of potential subsea destinations for the AquaWatcher is a testament to its value.
“You can install it anywhere,” Rustad says. “Christmas tree, manifold, jumper, anywhere.”
The AquaWatcher also measures the concentration of chemicals in the water, so operators can adjust the properties of drilling fluids injected into the well in real time, adding efficiency to a critical part of the overall operation.
As a then-joint venture between Cameron and Schlumberger, OneSubsea began developing the AquaWatcher in 2010, after operators started asking for the ability to get accurate water data without going through the timely (and thus costly) step of taking and analyzing samples.
The first units went into operation in West Africa last fall, and Rustad says OneSubsea is delivering “substantial numbers” of AquaWatchers to West Africa and other parts of the world.