Subsea tiebacks of increasingly long distance are being considered in multiple regions globally. In mature hydrocarbon production basins such as the North Sea and the US Gulf of Mexico, longer distance subsea tiebacks offer an opportunity to maximize production from existing hub facilities, reducing the development cost of new fields. In other regions, such as the East Mediterranean, Western Australia, and South-East Asia many fields are remote, often in very deep water. Delivering these fields as tiebacks offers significant CAPEX and OPEX economies compared with the procurement of new deep-water floating production units. Whilst there are significant potential benefits of delivering these future developments as subsea tiebacks, these long-distance tiebacks face multiple technical and commercial challenges such as: •Challenging flow assurance requiring chemical injection, subsea pumping, pipeline heating. •Supply chain constraints such as the reducing capacity of umbilical manufacturers with the increasing demand for subsea cables driven by offshore wind projects. •Equipment reliability. •Challenging risk profiles, such as the CAPEX impact of umbilical failure on long distance projects. Multiple new technologies are being developed and evaluated to overcome these and other technical and commercial constraints to long-distance tiebacks, and it is considered likely that future long distance tieback projects will utilize a new toolkit of technologies, with specific initiatives selected to both de-risk the developments and improve the economics of the project. One technology building block being considered for future long-distance tieback projects is the use of a buoy at the wellsite to provide power, control, remote communication facilities to the subsea equipment, in lieu of a long-distance umbilical from the host facility. This presentation provides a techno-economic assessment of using a utility buoy to provide power and control to a subsea tieback compared with a long-distance umbilical. A case study is presented detailing a utility buoy solution for a long-distance tieback project, based on BPT’s proprietary ‘Floating NUI’ buoy technology. The presentation will illustrate the functionality provided by the buoy technology, contrasting CAPEX, OPEX, and risk profile compared with a traditional umbilical solution.