Oil and Gas Fibre Optics By Karl Jeffery
Transoceanic fibre optic communications are absurdly cheap. We have all spent many hours sending e-mails and getting websites across oceans and barely paid a penny for it.
You don’t need a direct fixed connection from the rig to the fibre to benefit; a rig can communicate via Microwave or Wimax to a nearby rig which does have a fibre connection.
Over 500,000 km of fibre optic cables have been laid so far in the world. Fibre optic cables can carry a multiple of terabits per second, enough to keep the oil and gas industry happy for a few years at least. So as the oil and gas industry demands faster and more reliable communications, it seems sensible to assume we will be seeing a lot more fibre.
You can use a Microwave (line of sight) or WiMax link, carrying 80 mbps distances up to 80km, or 25 mbps of distances up to 15km, respectively.
And as the data requirements grow exponentially, with perhaps companies wanting to send continuously updated seismic data (5D?) and does videoconferencing for all staff members, wave technologies make is possible to for the fibre cables to carry a lot more data than it was originally designed for. But there are still plenty of oil rigs which do not have any fixed fibre connection, in areas of offshore activity such as the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf, off Africa and in Sakhalin. “The odds are that fibre optic networks are bound to happen in the Gulf of Mexico and off Africa,” says Marc Fullenbaum, product marketing group manager with Alcatel Submarine Networks. “Fibre in the Gulf of Mexico is under discussion,” he says. “I would say that the next interesting area is the West Coast of Africa.”
Costs The obstacle is the installation costs, and some kind of mechanism for them to be shared by several different companies. To give you an idea of the costs, BP has announced plans to spend $100m laying a 700km loop of fibre across its deepwater Gulf fields, entering the ocean in Freeport or Corpus Christi, Texas, and Pascagoula, Mississippi, in water depths of 3,000 to 8,000 feet. It will cover fields in the Viosca Knoll, Green Canyon, Atwater and Mississippi Canyon blocks, in a 700km loop. The intention is to start laying the cable in December 2006 and ‘light it up’ in summer 2007. BP says that the fibre optic connections will provide each rig with the equivalent of 50,000 satellite dishes. The network will be hurricane proof, but will enable the rigs to be operated when they have been evacuated after a hurricane. It could provide the communications links for the planned security communications, such as radar, undersea acoustic monitoring and cameras.
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