HP/HT Comes of Age: How the Oil and Gas Industry Is Deploying 20,000-psi Systems

Operators have gotten the message: high-pressure, high-temperature (HP/HT) technology has matured, opening up more oil resources in the Gulf of Mexico for development.

The oil and gas found at Anchor, Shenandoah, and North Platte (renamed Sparta) were unproducible until equipment manufacturers advanced the capabilities of existing technology to cope with the higher pressures and temperatures that are found in some of the Paleogene-aged reservoirs. The Gulf is home to two fields that have gone onstream using floating production hubs rated to handle 20,000 psi (20K). More 20K-psi projects are in the pipeline, of which three are additional hubs.

At the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston in May, operators and equipment manufacturers opened up about the HP/HT journey to date, the lessons they’ve learned, and the perpetual dream of equipment standardization.

Between 2006 and 2014, a number of lower tertiary Paleogene reservoirs were discovered. While exciting for the industry, they also posed challenges: they required subsea production technology rated above 15K psi, exceeding then-current capabilities, Richard White, senior subsea engineer at Chevron, said during the “Offshore HP/HT: Aligning Technical Excellence with Business Strategy” panel on 5 May.

Chevron started considering high-pressure technology for what would become the Anchor project as soon as it secured the lease, he said. The company acquired the six lease areas that comprise the Anchor area in lease sales in 2003 and 2008.

“We started doing the work even before it was a discovery,” he said. “The biggest decision there to mitigate risk is doing what you can as early as you can.”

Of the two onstream and three planned 20K-rated floating production units in the Gulf, Chevron’s Anchor Field was the most recently discovered and the first to go online.

The company’s strategy of investing in multiple efforts focused on developing 20,000‑psi equipment accelerated the technology for the wider upstream industry. For the subsea components alone, that effort involved rigorously reviewing designs, more than 120 qualification tests for hardware, and more than 500 qualification tests for materials. The subsea equipment installation phase for Anchor generated over 400 independent third-party (I3P) reports for US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) review and approval.

Chevron reported the field in Green Canyon Block 807 in 5,000-ft water depth as a discovery in 2014. When it went onstream in 2024, the Anchor floating production semisubmersible was the first such unit rated for 20,000 psi.

“Since starting this journey over a decade ago, the HP/HT segment of the offshore industry has matured. The industry now has a significant body of knowledge and experience implementing new HP/HT design methods and a large body or data set of materials properties in specific environments. The industry now has a large array of HP/HT technology and equipment that is available from multiple suppliers that has been qualified and approved by BSEE. There’s a large body of approved HP/HT documentation that will make technology approval simpler when the same technology is used for future projects. Many of these qualified designs have been converted to production, hardware installed, and are operating on assets such as Chevron’s Anchor facility,” White said.