Claxton Uncovered is a new blog format featuring behind-the-scenes information from staff members throughout the organisation.

With a Chartership from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), one of our Senior Design Engineers, Charles Youell, has had a significant impact on the success of Claxton over the past five years.

Working alongside our Technical Director and mentor Dannie Claxton, Charles has been involved in some of the largest and most complex challenges the company has ever faced. His appetite to solve intricate engineering problems has helped the company, and our clients, find money-saving solutions that work.

2015 marks our 30^th birthday here at Claxton Engineering. To celebrate, we’ve created an infographic of 30 facts you may not know about us – scroll down to see them all…

As an experienced supplier to the offshore industry, we’ve witnessed many clients treat centralizers as an afterthought or fall back in their platform repair projects.

The truth is that centralizers can become a much more useful asset to operators when they’re considered earlier in the process.

Here’s 3 reasons to start thinking about structural centralizers now:

As expected with the decline of the oil price, operators in the North Sea and beyond are turning their attention towards extending their asset’s life, as opposed to splashing the cash on new developments.

Centralizers, operating at the critical interface between the well conductor and the platform structure, provides vital ‘front line’ conductor integrity to support your existing assets wherever you are in the world.

On many new projects, centralizers are left until late in the day in the workscope – this is a mistake as significant cost savings can be made if centralizer design is considered early-on. Additionally retrofit centralizers have been growing in popularity due to an increasing need to secure older well conductors against integrity issues. So, while centralizers may be superficially similar in both these modes of application, the experience and insight needed to design effective units varies.

Pictured: A retrofit subsea centralizer being installed into a conductor guide.

Retrofit centralizers are fitted between the conductor and the guide after the conductor is already in place on the platform. Usually fitted at the splash zone level and subsea guides, retrofit centralizers are used in 6 different scenarios:

• Where there are doubts about accurate conductor space-out during installation
• Where conductors have been driven
• When centralizers were not installed at the point of conductor guide installation
• When errors in the tally were made with previously-installed centralizers
• To provide centralization for the guide due to the original centralizer failing
• Where existing conductor centralizers have significantly exceeded their design lives