Composites are recognized as an enabling technology in deepwater drilling scenarios, because the materials are able to stand up to the harsh subsea environment. In mid-2008 as the price of oil on the world market climbed, offshore oil exploration companies began striking out into deeper water, tapping more difficult-to-reach reserves beneath the ocean floor a mile or more below the water’s surface. However, the economic crisis of the latter half of 2008 resulted in significantly lower per-barrel prices, fomenting uncertainty. Bright spots for deepwater operators included the passage of an omnibus spending bill by the U.S. Congress in late September 2008 that removed a decades-old ban on oil drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the U.S., which could spur additional deepwater exploration. Another was the RPSEA program (Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America). RPSEA, based in Sugar Land, Texas, is a nonprofit corporation established to help meet the growing need for hydrocarbon resources produced from U.S. reservoirs. It is funding an Ultra-Deepwater Program (UDW), among others, to evaluate composite technologies.

Although production of composite risers — a hoped-for megamarket for carbon fiber composites in the offshore oil arena — has yet to be realized, carbon is making headway in deepsea umbilicals, among other applications. An umbilical is a bundled collection of steel and/or thermoplastic tubing and electric cabling used to transmit chemicals, hydraulic fluids, electric power and two-way communication and control signals between topside production vessels and subsea production equipment. Aker Solutions ASA (formerly Aker Kvaerner, Lysaker, Norway) has introduced a dynamic umbilical that features an outer casing reinforced along its length with multiple carbon-fiber rods pultruded by Epsilon Composite (Gaillan en Médoc, France). The rods feature longitudinal (0°) reinforcement with PANEX 35 commercial-grade 48K carbon fiber tow, provided by Zoltek Inc. (St. Louis, Mo.), wet out with vinyl ester resin supplied by Reichhold Inc. (Research Triangle Park, N.C.). An initial order, placed by Kerr-McGee (Oklahoma City, Okla.) for its Merganser field off the southern U.S. coast in the Gulf of Mexico, has been augmented by several follow-on orders. Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (APC, Houston, Texas), which acquired Kerr-McGee in August of 2006, placed an order for three more carbon rod umbilicals plus 180 km/112 miles of Aker’s conventional steel umbilicals for static placement, making it the largest umbilical order ever placed.

A more recent role for deepwater composites is the DELOS oceanographic monitoring platform. DELOS, which stands for Deep-ocean Environmental Long-term Observatory System, comprises two monitoring platforms made with pultruded composites manufactured by Exel Composites UK (Runcorn, Cheshire, U.K.). The platforms will be deployed in 1,400m/4,550 ft of water off the shore of West Africa. One will be sited within 50m/162 ft of a wellhead while the second will be located 8 km/5 miles away from any wellheads to act as a control. The composite platforms will support several self-contained scientific modules that will be retrieved and replaced periodically by remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to gain a better understanding of deep ocean environments. The pultruded glass/vinyl ester composites are very robust and meet the stringent requirements of E23/EN 13706-1:2002, a published European standard for pultruded components.