The paper reviews the techniques adopted to produce the power required to recover, process, and distribute hydrocarbons from a number of northern North Sea Shell-Esso fields included in the Brent System. There are six different combined drilling and production platforms, together with seabed and floating storage facilities with a design throughput of up to 770,000 bbl per day of oil and 1000 mmscfd of natural gas. The main energy demands have been identified as crude oil export pumping, compression of gas for sale, or re-injection and water injection to maintain reservoir pressure. To meet the power requirement 42 gas turbines of both industrial and aero derivative types have been installed. These have been selected to meet the specific applications and are used both for direct mechanical drives and electrical power generation. The merits of the various prime movers including electric motors are discussed with the relative advantages of reliability and flexibility developed. The paper outlines the design criteria used in the lay-out of the gas turbines and concludes with a description of the electrical system studies which predicted the motor and turbine inter-relationships when accelerating the various pumps and compressors to running speed.

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