When an old wellhead meets a modern BOP, loading can become a problem

Older subsea wells can have conductors and wellhead systems that were never designed to support the size and weight of today’s BOP stacks. BOP tethering can provide a way to manage that challenge. By connecting tether lines from the BOP frame to anchors or piles on the seabed, lateral movement of the BOP can be significantly reduced. This can help lower wellhead loading, improve fatigue life and extend operating limits during intervention or abandonment operations.

In one North Sea abandonment project, analysis showed that tethering reduced peak wellhead loading by a factor of five and improved fatigue life by a factor of 200 compared with the untethered configuration.

Read the full case study here.

Image credits: Trendsetter Vulcan Offshore