3D printing cuts offshore valve delivery from 52 weeks to under seven days

A check valve for an offshore platform used to take 52 weeks to arrive. It had to be cast, machined, shipped, cleared through customs and installed. ExxonMobil and EOS redesigned the part for additive manufacturing, cutting that wait to under seven days—a shift from an entire year to roughly one week in a real energy-supply-chain case.

The story comes from a paper by Angeline Goh and Mikhail Gladkikh, featured in VoxelMatters’ upcoming Energy eBook. Goh led Shell’s digital supply chain and 3D-printing program. Gladkikh, now Field CTO and VP of Alliances at nPower Technologies, has worked on advanced manufacturing and digital supply chains in regulated industries.

Their central claim is that additive manufacturing can function as energy infrastructure, not merely as a supplier of parts to the energy sector. The mechanism is straightforward: a digital design can be turned into a qualified component closer to where it is needed, using processes such as laser-based powder bed fusion, directed energy deposition or wire-arc manufacturing. That can shorten the distance between an industrial operator and a replacement part, particularly where conventional manufacturing networks are thin.

Brazil is the paper’s clearest case. Petrobras opened LABi3D at CENPES in December 2024 and inaugurated Brazil’s largest additive manufacturing center in Bahia in late 2025, combining polymer work with metal processes. The country has also validated its first safety-critical 3D-printed polymer component for the energy sector, while a DNV-qualified printed polymer part has been installed offshore—the first such example in Latin America. Nigeria’s 2024 study of NNPC’s adoption identifies similar demand, but without Brazil’s infrastructure or powder supply chain.

So what changes in practice? An operator could respond to an urgent offshore component need with a qualified digital production route rather than waiting for a part to cross a global chain of suppliers and borders. That does not mean printing everything locally: metal powder remains dependent on a small number of global suppliers, and secure digital part libraries, production equipment and qualification are all required. Updated industry standards have closed much of the gap that kept additive manufacturing out of regulated oil and gas environments, but the paper still treats the capability as something to build—not a finished system.