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Abstract Vacuum insulated tubing (VIT) has been used successfully to mitigate the potentially harmful effects of annular pressure buildup (APB). In a recent deepwater installation, the subject well had lost alternate APB mitigation capability through a series of events. VIT was then chosen as the only viable technology. A common design companion of VIT is gelled brine, chosen to decrease annular natural convection driven by heat loss around the VIT connections. There are, however, several drawbacks to the indiscriminate use of gelled brine: Tight clearances around the tubing hanger running tool, creating the potential for debris plugging and/or tool recovery issues from the subsea wellhead,Limitations imposed by VIT collapse and hydrostatic packer setting pressures,Unknown temperature/viscosity response and associated quality control requirements for displacement through a subsea wellhead, andA need to reduce operational time and cost. These issues led to the consideration of alternative means of controlling natural convection, and an effort was made to understand, improve, and deploy external coupling insulators. An in-ground vertical experiment with two connected joints of VIT was conducted with and without coupling insulators. Temperatures were monitored at multiple locations. Test results confirm the effectiveness of external coupling insulators. Several theoretical models using different numerical techniques (finite difference, lumped mass/resistance, finite element, and computational fluid dynamics) were found to be consistent with experimental results. These were compared with critical APB temperatures calculated with a commercial wellbore simulator. The net result of these studies was to adopt the external insulators. This paper reviews the experimental data and presents several models of a vertically aligned VIT in a deepwater completion. A comparison of thermally effective APB solutions, together with a critical assessment of modeling accuracy, is presented.