Offshore drilling contractor North Atlantic Drilling has agreed to purchase two next-generation GE Oil & Gas SeaONYXTM blowout preventer (BOP) control systems, upgrading control spreads on board NAD’s semi-submersible West Venture and drill ship West Navigator.

The SeaONYX BOP control system extends system availability by incorporating multiple redundancies and hot-swappable components to keep operations online. SeaONYX is built upon GE’s proven Mark VIe architecture, at work in more than 2,000 wind, hydroelectric and nuclear power installations worldwide.

In addition to improved uptime performance compared to other controllers, SeaONYX is a keystone of GE’s predictive drilling management technology, which helps drillers to address issues before they occur.

“Once SeaONYX is on board, the architecture is in place to incorporate a broad array of monitoring and intelligent systems that have the potential to virtually eliminate unplanned downtime,” said Chuck Chauviere, president of Drilling Systems—GE Oil & Gas. “Adding RamTel Plus provides detailed information on the ram BOP’s functionality, while the Drilling iBox can model this data to predict future performance. Armed with this data, the drilling contractor can plan condition-based maintenance at service intervals based around the drilling schedule. The predictivity that GE Oil & Gas delivers for operators means traditional break-fix maintenance can be replaced with a proactive, recommended maintenance model that has the potential to eliminate the lost drilling time that is unavoidable with the old model.”

Blowout preventers are critical pieces of drilling equipment that are used to isolate pressure in oil and gas wells during drilling or close the well entirely in an emergency. The SeaONYX BOP control system is available as an upgrade to existing GE BOP controllers and is included in all new GE Oil & Gas BOP stacks for floating drilling rigs.

Press Release, February 03, 2014; Image: GE