Optimal design of power hubs for offshore petroleum platforms

Even though advanced power generation systems offer higher efficiencies than simpler gas turbines, severe area and weight restrictions keep on impeding their widespread implementation in offshore petroleum industry. If those could be resolved, the performance of utilities platforms may drastically enhanced. In order to overcome these practical limitations, installation a hub is proposed centralize energy supply required by number floating production, storage offloading units (FPSOs). However, many challenges are still brought companies contemplating this approach, such as incremental costs prolonged offdesign operating conditions. This circumstance renders necessary determine optimal number, layout load modular hub. Thus, work, computational framework developed assist selection most suitable setups, so that trade-off between overall efficiency lower investment cost can elucidated. consists group subroutines evaluates, compares ranks alternative utility terms well-defined objective functions, whereas subject restricted space allowances. As result, configurations based largest bottoming cycles benefit from economies scale, well an increased efficiency, if compared other designs smaller cycles. Levelized electricity reaches 40 USD/MWh when only turbines installed, which reduced 13% combined preferred. The weight-to-power ratio hubs remains 12–28% conventional setup, increase achieves up 7 percentage points.