Welcome to the Offshore Facilities feature in this month’s JPT. The three papers featured in this section were selected out of 141 collected covering various elements of offshore-facilities design, construction, installation, operation, and inspection.
The first paper covers the design, fabrication, transportation, installation, and startup of a floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessel in an ultradeepwater location in the Gulf of Mexico. The vessel is connected to production and an export gas pipeline with a disconnectable buoy, which allows the FPSO vessel to sail off location in the event of a hurricane. The paper highlights the design features of the installation and some of the project-execution challenges.
The second paper describes a technology-development effort to monitor the mechanical integrity of flexible risers in offshore use through a technique called Monitoring Based on Optical Fiber Attached Directly on Armor Wires, or MODA. This is an interesting approach to assess the integrity of the tensile armor at the top section of flexible risers, and the authors summarize years of work in developing the required hardware and data processing.
The final paper covers field work performed to ascertain the functional capacity limits of existing equipment on a deepwater platform in excess of the original nameplate limits. It is fairly typical of the industry that, sometime after process facilities are installed, an opportunity to increase production is presented and the engineer must divine the absolute limits of the equipment. This paper presents a nice narrative of one company’s work to answer this question.
I hope you enjoy reading these papers.
This Month's Technical Papers
Turritella FPSO—Design and Fabrication of the World’s Deepest Producing Unit
Optical Sensors Monitor Vulnerable Top Sections of Flexible Risers
Field Trials Help Boost Processing Capacity of Offshore Facility Above Nameplate Limit
Recommended Additional Reading
OTC 27526 General Design of Lean MEG Storing in the Jacket Legs on Liwan Gas Field of South China Sea by Zhi Xia, China National Offshore Oil Corporation, et al.
OTC 27719 Fixed Platforms at Aging Oil Fields—Feasibility Study for Reuse to Wind Farms by J.C. Barros, Genesis Oil and Gas, et al.
OTC 27742 Enabling Materials and Corrosion Technologies for Optimizing Offshore Developments by Eric J. Wright, ExxonMobil Production Company
