Alternative conductor guide design

Abstract

Conductor guides are one of the high cost items of a drilling platform because fabrication of the guides is not amenable to automation and is labour intensive. In order to reduce fabrication costs and increase efficiency an alternative conductor guide design is proposed to replace the conventional conductor guide design. The proposed alternative design involves the replacement of circular hollow sections by square hollow sections for the fabrication of conductor framings. A detailed study has been carried out to investigate the effects of such replacement on the structural integrity of a typical shallow water jacket structure based on both the in-place and fatigue analyses. It was found that the replacement was beneficial to the integrity of the jacket structure in the in-place analysis, but the reverse was true in the fatigue study. However, the results show that the proposed alternative conductor guide design was economically viable for the jacket structure studied.