Recent Advances in Subsea Completion/Workover Blowout Preventers

ABSTRACT Several recent advances have been made in subsea completion/ workover blowout preventers (BOPs) which reduce the cost, weight, size, and time required for subsea workover and completion applications while maintaining safety. Newly released ram designs have made broad steps in the areas of shearing, suspending, and sealing. In addition to new rams, new approaches to bonnet design have increased the features while decreasing the size of subsea workover BOPs. The primary focus of these designs is the increased use of coiled tubing for drilling, completion, and workover operations. In most cases these new advances will cut the required number of ram cavities for a dual string system in half and eliminate at least one trip down hole. These designs have been proposed for use in subsea tree running tools, lower riser packages, subsea BOP blocks, cutting packages, and traditional workover BOP stacks.