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KTH Tupi system handles record pressure

KTH is accustomed to designing equipment to work in harsh environments, but one of the company’s latest projects required them to push engineering boundaries three times further than ever before!

The Tupi Area of the Santos Basin in Brazil is one of the world’s largest oil reserves, with an estimated 6 to 12 billion barrels available. It also presents some unique challenges to the oil and gas exploration and production industry.

One such challenge is an FPSO (floating production, storage and offloading vessel) project involving the re-injection of the greenhouse gas – Carbon Dioxide to force out more oil and prevent the release of the green house gas into the atmosphere. To achieve this, the CO2 is separated from the oil coming out of the well onboard the FPSO. The gas is then compressed to 600 bar and re-injected back into the well via a series of injection pumps, thereby forcing more oil from the well.

To operate at 600bar the injection pumps require mechanical seals which are pressurised to a higher pressure than the product in the pump. In this way, should a seal fail, no escape of gas is possible. To enable this process to work, KTH has designed and is now in the process of manufacturing, 2 seal systems to operate at 675bar, pushing the boundary by a factor of three compared with the previous highest pressure seal system, which operated at 225bar.

Pushing the pressure up by a factor of three over previous operating units, the KTH system has been custom designed and built to support  EagleBurgmann mechanical seals on the two CO2 injection pumps for the Tupi FPSO