Hamworthy has continued its run of Flare Gas Ignition system orders, following a contract to deliver its technology to Statoil’s Gudrun field in the Norwegian part of the North Sea.
The company, which has delivered 13 flare gas ignition systems in 2011 so far, said that the latest contract was being “fast-tracked”, with delivery as soon as November this year.
Halfdan Millang, Operations Director for Hamworthy Gas Recovery Systems, said: “All systems with a flare require a flare gas ignition system to operate safely, but I think the fact that our system is designed for over 20 years in operation is material to this continuing run of orders. We have designed in longevity to ensure that our system can handle extreme heat near the flare tip.”
Mr Millang said that the scope of supply for the latest order would include the Flare Gas Ignition cabinet, the guide pipe and fragment collector box. “The flare ignition cabinet is installed at a safe distance from the flare stack and, in this case, a 2000m guide pipe that leads to the flare tip,” he said. “The system is suitable for all flare tips and may ignite several flares on one flare deck when the pressure increases and it can no longer hold the gas. It combines high reliability and availability over the lifetime of the facility with low maintenance requirements, and is easily retrofitted into existing installations. It does not need any pilot burners, and has no equipment on the flare deck that is sensitive to heat, such as cables, instrumentation, or electrodes.”
The World Bank has identified the recovery of the gas currently flared or vented by the oil industry as one of the key ways to meet the world’s increasing demand for fossil fuel energy. Today, at least 150 billion cubic metres of natural gas is reckoned to be flared or vented annually. Not only does this equate to around 25% of the natural gas consumed by Europe alone, it adds about 400 million tonnes of CO2 to worldwide emissions per year.
The Gudrun field is located 55 kilometres north of Sleipner, where water depth is 110 metres. The field contains both oil and gas. The platform is to be developed as a fixed processing platform with seven production wells and will be tied back to existing facilities in the Sleipner area and the Kårstø processing plant north of Stavanger.
