Materials selection for subsea Oil & Gas equipment

Dr. Sergio Lucato
Senior Research Scientist
Teledyne Scientific
Thousand Oaks, CA

As current offshore oil & gas reservoirs are being depleted, the industry is moving to new developments in water depths in excess of 5,000 ft. These so-called ultra-deep water wells come with a significant set of challenges on all levels of  engineering. Not only is  the wellhead at the ocean floor  under substantial  hydrostatic pressure, the produced fluids inside the production equipment is under tremendous pressure and temperature. BP’s Macondo
incident has demonstrated how faulty materials can result in catastrophic consequences.

With the move to ultra-deep water, the oil & gas industry is at a critical point with regards to available materials. Conventional structural and elastomeric materials are at their very limits and offer little to no safety factor. A shift to new materials is required, bringing with it a host of new challenges.

This presentation will aim to give an overview of offshore production equipment, focusing on the materials for wellhead components. Materials testing and selection are vital to ensuring high reliability over the expected live span in excess of 25 years. Given t he multitude of environmental f actors acting on the equipment, the correct selection  of materials is  not a trivial task.  An introduction into  materials selection will  be given  along with examples on how the subsea and downhole environments influence the decision making.

Dr. Sergio  L. dos Santos e  Lucato is a Senior   Research Scientist  for  Materials and  Structures at  Teledyne Scientific. He  obtained  his PhD ( Honors,  2002) in  Materials  Science from  the  Darmstadt  University  of Technology,  Germany working on experimental and theoretical fracture mechanics of piezoelectric ceramics. Prior to  joining Teledyne,  he was a Post  Doctoral Research  Associate at the  University of California, Santa Barbara, where he developed and tested high-authority shape morphing structures. Dr. Lucato’s primary research areas are in the design and optimization of adaptive structures and in the mechanics of composite structures and materials. He is the program manager for a corporate wide materials design database of dielectrics subjected to extreme environments for lifetime predictions.