Offshore Oil & Gas sub-sea projects often pose complex and taxing technical and operational conundrums. We pride ourselves at DMC Ltd with an ability to innovate new solutions to new technical and operational problems, but we find more often than not, that most problems that occur have usually been previously encountered in the Industry, probably many times. It is our experience that that most operational and technical problems that our clients are faced with can be solved by recalling or researching similar problems from the past, avoiding previous mistakes, building on past successes and applying new innovation where required without any need to re-invent the wheel.

It is also our experience that although the offshore oil and gas business is by definition a frontier industry, it is also one of the most conservative when seeking new solutions to old problems. Sometimes, all that DMC Ltd provide is a new and lateral look at an old problem, and by keeping abreast of new technical developments, materials and innovations that are occurring in the industry, and applying a fresh look at a problem with no preconceptions of “how we have always done it” we can often arrive at a new slant that cures the technical problem or achieves an operational objective quicker and cheaper than previously envisaged.

Previous Projects - TA Caps

A typical case in point, was the problem of TA caps in suspended mud-line wells which prevented abandonment of subsea wells without the intervention of a work-over drilling rig. The problem had plagued the industry fore several years, and no suspended MLS wells with TA caps in place at the mudline had been removed without the use of a drilling rig prior to the advent of the tooling assembly invented by David Dixon.

The concept for a solution was to replicate the torque capability of the drilling rig tooling available on the drill floor, but at the seabed and with sufficient power to reverse out TA caps that had originally been set with drill string from a rig. The solution was to design a reaction tool which anchored to the 30” conductor subsea, and which could house a set of casing tongs modified for subsea use. By using a short length of drill string and the appropriate landing tool the assembly was located onto the well with divers, and TA caps were reversed out exactly as if from the drill floor.

	This Mk1 assembly was later redesigned for a client by DMC to use a much smaller rotating device and also to incorporate a facility for transferring reaction forces to the seabed.
This Mk 2 system was built and commissioned by a Dutch contractor and is still available for use. The design rights and intellectual property of this system remain with DMC Ltd.