What are the major subsea challenges and issues across the different offshore basins of the world?
The challenges vary widely. In the GOM, for example, the market provides fast response to many demands related to technology, engineering, construction, and equipment supply. Nevertheless, the harsh GOM ultradeepwater environment or, as in some recent discoveries, rather deep reservoirs with high pressure and high temperature still pose significant technical challenges. On the other hand, there are places such as west Africa where the environmental and technical challenges are not as demanding, but the local market is not yet fully developed. In this case, commonly used technologies sometimes become economically prohibitive. Then, one must account for limited intervention and repair capabilities when designing the production systems. To a lesser extent, the same applies to the Brazilian case. We have tried to use heated pipe-in-pipe flowlines and bundles in Brazil, but because of the lack of installing capacity, they end up being too expensive to apply when mob/demob fees are considere
