June 3, 2021 – Nexans announced that it has won two contracts from Equinor, an international energy company present in more than 30 countries worldwide, for two offshore projects.

The first contract, a press release said, calls for Nexans to design, manufacture and supply 44 km of steel tube umbilicals and accessories for an offshore Brazilian project: the Bacalhau ultra-deep water, oil-field development project. It targets pre-salt reservoirs in the Santos Basin estimated to contain up to two billion barrels of oil equivalent (bboe) recoverable reserves.

The order extends Nexans’s long-standing relationship with the Subsea Integration Alliance (SIA) formed between Subsea 7 and OneSubsea. It is responsible for the SURF (subsea, umbilical, risers, and flowlines) front-end engineering and design (FEED) contracts for the Bacalhau project. Nexans’s Halden plant in Norway will provide the SIA with steel tube umbilicals to provide vital services for subsea equipment operating at water depths down to
2,100 m. This includes 2.5 km of gas-lift umbilical, 35 km of static umbilical, 6.9 km of dynamic umbilical and accessories. Nexans is scheduled to deliver the Bacalhau umbilicals in the last quarter of 2022.

The second order was for the fabrication of umbilicals for the Askeladd Vest project, which is in the southern Barents Sea. Nexans will provide static subsea umbilicals with a complex cross-section of power, fiber-optic communications and hydraulic elements for chemical injection, along with a range of connection and termination accessories.

The subsea template on Askeladd Vest will be tied back to the Askeladd field through a pipeline and an umbilical. The distance from the onshore production plant at Melkøya to the subsea field is 195 km, which is the longest distance ever for such a field development.
The main activity of assembling umbilicals and loading them onto installation vessels will be performed at Nexans’ plant in Halden. The control cables will be assembled at Nexans’ plant in Halden and unloaded on installation vessels. Fiber optic cables and power cables will be manufactured in Rognan. The contract value is estimated at nearly $12 million.