ICON’s Advanced Riser Tension Protection (ARTP) compensator is now available on a short-term rental basis — a proven solution to mitigate the Major Accident Event Hazard of compensator lock-up, effective on rigs with either active or passive systems, and designed to meet short lead times at lower cost than a capital purchase.
What Is the “Locked to Bottom” Risk This Compensator Mitigates?
Subsea well work from floating drilling rigs requires careful planning to ensure safe execution. Heave compensation reliability is particularly critical when conducting well testing or completions work, where the landing string or workover riser is connected to the wellhead and “locked to bottom.”
Failure or lock-up of the rig’s motion compensator, whether it’s a passive or active type, while locked to bottom can have catastrophic consequences. This kind of failure is classified in offshore safety cases as a Major Accident Event Hazard (MAEH) — the same category used for events like blowouts or structural collapse — because a locked-to-bottom compensator failure can transmit rig heave loads directly into a well that has no ability to move to absorb them. For operators, that risk sits squarely inside the ALARP framework — the same “as low as reasonably practicable” standard ICON’s other heave compensation projects are designed against — which is why a fast, low-capex rental option matters as much as the engineering itself.
A cost-effective risk mitigation tool has now been fully developed, tested and demonstrated on multiple projects offshore Western Australia. In October 2016, an earlier ARTP unit was exported for use in Africa — a separate, earlier shipment to the ARTP C-Series export covered elsewhere on this site.
How the ARTP Compensator Works
ICON has a series of Advanced Riser Tension Protection frames designed specifically to mitigate rig compensator lock-up or failure. Developed in consultation with leading operators and drilling contractors, the ARTP is an independent back-up compensator configured to eliminate single point failure by providing full system redundancy. The ARTP series provides a fit-for-purpose solution across a range of different applications and loads, as part of ICON’s broader Heave Compensation Solutions capability.
As a temporary back-up compensator for locked-to-bottom operations, the ARTP is designed as a self-contained unit for rapid deployment and rig-up. Once installed, the rig’s own motion compensator can still be operated as the primary compensator in the normal manner, eliminating the need for new operating procedures and rig crew training. If there’s an issue with the rig’s compensator, the ARTP automatically and rapidly activates from back-up to compensating mode in either an over-tension (excessive top tension) or under-tension (loss of top tension) event, protecting the landing string or workover riser and maintaining well integrity.
The ARTP is designed, tested and certified to the same industry codes and standards as primary heave compensation systems, and can also be used as a primary compensator in its own right.
Field Tested, Proven, and Available for Heave Compensator Rental
ICON’s ARTPs have gone through extensive research and onshore testing, and are now field-proven offshore, having already been used on 17 different wells on world-class projects offshore Western Australia with excellent reliability. On one campaign consisting of 1,032 operating hours, the ARTP recorded just 1 hour of downtime.
The delivery lead time and capex for this kind of equipment can be a real challenge, particularly for projects with short planning cycles or duration. To address this, ICON makes ARTP compensators and its wider Tension Lift Frames range available for both purchase and short-term rental through its Rental Equipment programme, alongside its broader Drilling, Completions & Well Test Support capability.
ICON has continued to build on this track record since: the ARTP C-Series was exported to West Africa in a later, separate shipment, and the latest ARTP E-Series has since completed a nine-well, locked-to-bottom well completion campaign on an LNG project in the Carnarvon Basin, recording a 0.1% non-productive time rating.
