Technology on the Agenda

12 May 2010

The Subsea Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) Conference in Newcastle is aimed at professionals working in the field of subsea engineering.

The emphasis has been placed on future technology requirements, availability and obsolescence.

This long-established and unique international conference dealing exclusively with underwater instrumentation, control and communication technology for subsea oil and gas production has been structured to cover relevant experience and new thinking in subsea developments.

Equally, importance has been placed on global issues such as environment, decommissioning, deepwater problems and long- distance offsets.

Reliability of systems also continues to play a dominant role. Topics include: all electric systems, seabed processing, fibre optic transmission and distributed systems.

This conference will feature contributions from professionals giving experience gained and new challenges overcome and is of interest therefore to all in subsea engineering.

Subsea control system architectures are slowly changing with the improvements in technology, but still lag behind their surface/topsides counterparts. There is a need for the subsea controls industry to embrace technology and review where it wishes to be. Both the subsea and topsides control system manufacturers tend to use their own developed protocols, which is good for maintaining a hold on the interface, but potentially detrimental in the interfacing to third party devices.

This conference, to be held from June 2-3, provides a unique forum for the supplier and operator of subsea technology to exchange views and experiences.

It focuses on all aspects of subsea engineering, including long offset, seabed processing and deepwater developments.

The aim of this particular event is to bring together the many and diverse disciplines engaged internationally in this technology. Experience gained and current challenges, as well as new advances in technology, will be the main topics to meet the future challenges.

The high cost and hazardous nature of recovering hydrocarbons offshore have led to the trend of reducing topsides facilities and to the growth in subsea production control.

Subsea control capabilities have been considerably enhanced by the generation of microprocessor-based systems.

The latest control facilities enable the provision of a subsea interface for advanced technology installations. These include artificial reservoir lift systems, multiphase flow measurement, downhole monitoring and intelligent sensors, and the conventional tree control functions.

However, these advanced technologies impose increased data processing and communication overheads in the form of closed loop motor control, local data processing multi channel communications, downloading of calibration software, and intelligent diagnostics.

This international conference will cover all these issues and more over the course of two days.