• Marine

Lifting Weak Link Bails to the next level

ScanTech AS’s highly innovative and simple Weak Link Bail (WLB) system has been successfully deployed on floating rigs worldwide.

The WLB system increases worker protection and enhance safety during well testing, flow backs, clean ups, completions, plugging and abandonment and workover operations. The WLB system owes its success to a simple self-contained mechanism that prevents over-tension of the completion and workover riser if the primary heave compensator fails when the rig is locked to the seabed.

In the past, height restrictions have made using the existing WLB system tricky (and potentially dangerous) when working with Coiled Tube Lifting Frames (CTLF). More than half of rig work operations are estimated to use coiled tubing, at least as a contingency, so the technical teams at ScanTech AS and key partner Stavanger Engineering AS have been developing the WLB-CT as a workable solution to this challenge.

Chris Stevens, managing director of ScanTech says:

“What the guys have achieved is brilliantly simple - rather than looking at these systems as two distinct pieces of physical hardware, they worked together to identify how both could be used at the same time in the same physical space.”

This latest development, created by the team at ScanTech incorporates the field-proven capability of the WLB into the CTLF using conventional tension frame design principles within the confinements of the existing space. This new design incorporates a detachable 3-axis injector table, which reduces bulk and makes rigging-up easier, so reducing rig-up time while increasing worker protection, safety and reliability in what is a recognised industry risk – compensator lock up.

With confirmed interest from a major oil corporation the first production version of the WLB-CT is at the final design stage for use in a North Sea campaign in 2015.