The technical challenges of designing oil and gas pipelines in the arctic

The world demand of oil and gas is growing at an ever increasing rate, and as a result, there is a demand to explore new areas for more petroleum production. The arctic region is one of the remaining unexplored areas where such exploration still can be done. According to the US Geological Survey estimates, the arctic region, mostly offshore, holds as much as 25% of the world´s untapped reserve of hydrocarbons where much of the reserve is lying under seasonal or year-round sea ice. The exploitation of these remaining reserves, however, will depend upon meeting the technical challenges of design, construction, and operation of offshore installations. Despite some experience with Arctic oil and gas exploration and production during the last three decades, technology gaps still exist and will have to be bridged in order to enable optimized developments to proceed. In this paper, technical design difficulties particular to arctic pipelines are presented; these include ice gouging, permafrost thaw settlement, strudel scour, and upheaval buckling. An emphasis is then placed on advanced finite element techniques that can be used to address these issues, with an example of such techniques illustrating their ability to model highly complex and nonlinear phenomena.