Wood Group Kenny supports industry leading oil spill containment project

ABERDEEN, Scotland -- Wood Group Kenny (WGK) has secured a five-year contract with Oil Spill Response (Capping) Ltd. (OSRCL) to provide the maintenance support for a key part of a containment toolkit that would be used to control hydrocarbon release in the event of a subsea well control incident.

The multi-million dollar project will see WGK work with OSRCL to ensure that the flexible flowlines included in the toolkit are continuously in a condition suitable for immediate load out if mobilized by subscribing oil and gas operators. This will include maintenance management, recommendations for preservation, inspection and testing of all ancillary and lifting equipment, as well as the flexible flowlines, stored at sites in the UK, Singapore and Brazil.

Bob MacDonald, CEO of Wood Group Kenny, said, “This project is of vital importance to the industry as subsea well control and oil spill containment is always high on the safety agenda and key to incident response. When an operator is faced with a situation, which could lead to a significant hydrocarbon release, this system has to be ready to be deployed rapidly with the assurance that it will be fit for purpose.”

The flowlines are critical to the containment toolkit designed for the Subsea Well Response Project (SWRP), a joint industry project managed by Shell in Norway and funded by eight of the major operating companies. WGK took an innovative approach in the SWRP to engineer the flexibles, improving traditional design to fulfil the criteria for this standby kit.

MacDonald continued, “Being selected to support OSRCL in this work is testament to the caliber of engineering and level of expertise we have within WGK. Having designed the subsea system, and delivering an innovation solution for this, we are ideally placed to ensure the ongoing effectiveness of this contingency technology.”

The flexible flowlines will be shipped to an incident site in the event of a hydrocarbon release; part of the containment toolkit that can be used at water depths of up to 3,000 m and accommodating a range of operating pressures, temperatures and fluid compositions.

Intended to be used with standard industry hardware, this equipment needs to be interfaced with a readily-available well test riser and well test surface spread on a drill rig or drillship. It permits the rig to be located offshore at a safe distance from the incident site, and the innovative system can be deployed safely in most weather conditions.

The work will be delivered by WGK teams in Aberdeen and Newcastle in the UK, Perth, Australia, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

WGK, with support from Wood Group Mustang, has supported the SWRP project since 2012, helping it achieve its goal of improving the subsea well control incident intervention capabilities of the wider industry.