Maersk Drilling is ordering the world’s first 20,000 PSI-rated blow out preventers from GE Oil and Gas.
These giant stacks of milled steel, heavy-duty piping and finely tuned electro-hydraulic equipment will be deployed on board a pair of purpose-built 20k psi drilling rigs that will be delivered at the end of 2018.
These rigs will be used as part of an agreement to support BP’s Project 20K, a joint study that aims to unlock the vast oil reserves within the Paleogene, or Lower Tertiary zones – an area that BP holds a strong position in.
The difficulty with the Paleogene is that it’s very deep and at a very high temperature which limits the recoverable resources to about 10 percent of the reservoir.
In a study it carried out, Wood Mackenzie estimates that a two percentage point increase in recovery from a typical Paleogene field would add USD $1 billion of value to the field.
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