Most of the newest oil discoveries are found offshore in ever deeper waters, up to 3000 meter of water depth or even more. Current technologies in Top Tensioned Risers, Steel Catenary Risers and Flexibles are approaching their technical limit and will be very expensive or impossible to use for these water depths.  

Airborne proposes a Thermoplastic Composite Riser (TCR) as alternative to current solutions. The TCR will achieve a break-through performance improvement in terms of weight, top tension, fatigue, stiffness, strain and cost of installation.  Airborne Composite Tubulars has taken the initiative to form a consortium with MCS Advanced Subsea Engineering, a leading engineering firm for deepsea oil & gas projects, and OTM Consulting, specialist in management of large projects, and jointly propose a Joint Industry Programme in response to a call for proposal issued by the ITF in Aberdeen, UK. This proposal was selected as one of the few from all the proposals, and is currently sponsored by BG Group, BP, Chevron, SBM Offshore, Shell, Statoil and Total. The project has started on July 15 2009 and will run for 18 months.

An important aspect is that the behaviour of such a riser system under operational conditions will be different than current solutions. In some cases the weight of our riser system can even be to low and some weight needs to be added. A full-system analysis has been carried out by MCS, which takes all these effects into account, and it showed that 60% reduction of top tension can be achieved using the TCR.

The project aims to prove the concept of a Thermoplastic Composite Riser by analysis and hardware testing. It covers the analysis of several scenarios idetermined by the sponsors, for each of which a specific TCR design and a global system analysis will be made. Large scale pipe test specimens will be made and tested to validate the designs and analysis model. The next step after this project will be be to define a specific application, design the TCR, manufacture it and implement it in operational field testing.

For more information, visit http://www.compositeriser.com/ or contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it  PhD., Project Leader and Engineering Manager Airborne Composite Tubulars.