Global Contracts Awarded for Expro Group's Permanent Downhole Monitoring Systems

Leading international oilfield service company, the Expro Group, has been awarded a number of new contracts in the North Sea and West Africa for the supply and deployment of permanent downhole monitoring systems. The contract awards, together worth in excess of £5 million, reinforce the Group's position as one of the market's leading providers of permanent monitoring services and underline the positive response to the company's restructuring last year.

The Expro Group's Subsurface Systems business stream, incorporating permanent monitoring services, focuses on the development or re-development phase of a reservoir or wellbore and utilizes niche innovative technologies for subsea, permanent monitoring, and subsea power connector requirements, particularly in deepwater regions. In this structure, the Group, through its global network of regional offices, has seen significant success through the gain of new contracts worldwide.

North Sea
In the North Sea, Texaco has contracted the Expro Group to provide 15 SURELIFT/H systems for the innovative subsea hydraulic submersible pump (HSP) deployment on the Captain Area B development. The SURELIFT/H system provides downhole measurements of pressure, temperature, flow, vibration, and shaft speed from multiple sensors distributed throughout the wellbore and around the pump set. In the same project, Texaco has placed a contract with Cameron Controls to supply dedicated subsea monitoring PODS, each equipped with Expro interface cards and high speed modems to enable the one-second update rate required for HSP monitoring.

Also in the North Sea region, the Expro Group has successfully deployed and installed the first of 15 SURELIFT/E systems, providing downhole flowrate, pump suction and discharge pressures in combination with motor winding temperature, and vibration measurement for Shell Exploration and Production on the Brent Enhanced Voidage project. The system has already been used extensively to assist with completion operations and pump start-up and commissioning.

West Africa
Mobil Equatorial Guinea has placed a contract for the installation of 28 single point pressure and temperature systems for the Jade platform. This award follows shortly after the installation of 20 systems on the Zafiro subsea well development. Using innovative data management systems, the Group is able to send reservoir data, through Web-enabled technology, from all wells to Mobil's offices in Equatorial Guinea and Dallas, over 8,000 miles from the platform.

Following the placement of an order from Chevron in late 1998, the Expro Group has installed six single point systems in the Kuito development in offshore Angola, with a further six systems planned for installation over the forthcoming months.

In offshore Angola, Elf Exploration Angola a fully owned subsidiary of Elf Aquitaine has contracted the Expro Group to install 17 subsea dual redundant single point pressure and temperature PIGs at a waterdepth of 1,350 meters in the Girassol Field. First installation of the project will begin early next millenium, and continue during the next 2-3 years.

Graeme Coutts, COO for the Expro Group, noted, "Our permanent monitoring systems allow for the provision of continuous real-time data in both the conventional and the emerging technology of extended well architectures, associated with intelligent wells. This presents our clients with the capability to optimize field development and it's associated management to fully realize their
investment. More and more we are delivering data directly to the customers desk, enabling multi-user access through Web-enabled technology, critical decisions on well/production management can be made immediately and without additional intervention work."