GE system feeds data from stack

One of the many lessons learned in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe was the need to know exactly what is going on inside the blowout preventer.

Normally, the only visual display of the temperature, pressure and location of equipment inside the blowout preventer is on the rig, and when the rig disconnects from the subsea stack, it loses the ability to display that information.

“There was a desperate search for information about what was going on with that BOP stack,” Chuck Chauviere, president of GE’s drilling department, said of the Macondo disaster.

“There was no visual indication of where any of the equipment was,” he said.

So GE Oil & Gas developed two new systems to fix that.

The first, the RamTel Plus, uses a linear displacement measurement device to give the exact position of the ram, which is the device within the blowout preventer charged with severing the drill string.

The device is widely used, but has never been applied to a preventer before.

“We also added the ability of it to give you the actual pressure that is being experienced by that actual cavity when it’s closing,” Chauviere said.

“It’s like a tire pressure gauge. We are giving you the data at the point as opposed to some other position along the instrumented chain,” he said.

The second device, the ROV Display, is a dashboard monitor attached to the outside of the blowout preventer that shows the RamTel information, as well as well bore temperature, enabling remoteoperated vehicles to send video images to vessels at the surface.

“This is diagnostic information previously unavailable in a planned or unplanned” rig disconnect, Chauviere said. Ford Gunter is a freelance writer in Houston.