EXCELLENT RELIABILITY
OFFSHORE NATURAL GAS TREATMENT
STATOIL TURBOEXPANDERS ON SLEIPNER FIELDS
North Sea Natural Gas Sleipner East and West are 2 offshore fields operated by Statoil, one of the largest companies in Norway and one of the major gas companies in Europe.
These Sleipner installations now produce around 20% of the gas production of Statoil (approx. 12giga m3/ year , a huge volume of natural gas!).
The gigantic Sleipner platforms have been designed to carry 60,000 tons of equipment to be operated under extreme weather conditions.
Storms with waves of 20meters and challenging deep sea reservoirs require advanced technology which is well proven.
The turboexpanders used in the separation process (natural gas, condensates, water and CO2) are critical machines with high availability requirements.
The choice of turboexpanders equipped with magnetic bearings was made first on Sleipner East ( 4 units started in 1993), then on Sleipner West (4 units started in 1996) .
The innovative solution proposed by the manufacturer Cryostar was to use the magnetic bearing technology on these large high pressure natural gas turboexpanders (power 3. 3 MW, inlet 100 bar, outlet 40 bar).
Today these 8 turboexpanders , which process 100% of the natural gas from the Sleipner fields, are the most reliable machines on the platform.
Mr. Harald Underbakke (Statoil), who is in charge of the operation and maintenance of t he Sleipner platforms, states:
"Their reliability is excellent (over 99.6 %) and the preventive maintenance is only 10 hours per unit and per year. In addition, the magnetic bearing monitoring system provides records of machine signatures in our data computers"
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