Kosmos Energy to convert FPSO to permanently spread moored facility
Kosmos Energy, one of the oil production companies working on Ghana’s oil fields says following damage to the turret bearing of the FPSO Kwame Nkrumah, identified in February 2016, the vessel is likely to be converted to a permanently spread moored facility.
“Kosmos and its Partners have made excellent progress towards establishing the best long-term solution, and based on the work undertaken over the past four months, now sees converting the FPSO to a permanently spread moored facility, with offtake through a new deepwater offloading buoy, as the preferred long-term solution,” the company said.
Kosmos indicated that the damage necessitated the FPSO to be shut down for an extended period in April with production resuming in early May.
“Since then, 18 offtakes to the storage tanker have been successfully conducted using the dynamically positioned (DP) shuttle tanker and gross production of field has gradually increased, averaging around 90,000 bopd in June,” it said in a press release copied to ghanabusinessnews.com.
Kosmos says it expects the Jubilee field to continue operating under these new procedures for the remainder of 2016 and anticipates average gross annual production to be around 74,000 bopd for 2016, which equates to average gross production of approximately 85,000 bopd in the second half of 2016.
The company says upon completion of the spread mooring work programme, production is expected to return to the levels achieved before the turret bearing issue occurred.
“The Partners will review potential opportunities to improve the efficiency of offtake procedures, which may include the use of a larger DP shuttle tanker. The additional operating expenditure is expected to be around $115 million gross for 2016 and $80 million gross for 2017.
A deepwater offloading buoy, anticipated to be installed in the first half 2018, will restore full offloading functionality and remove the need for the DP shuttle and storage tankers and associated operating costs. Market enquiries are currently ongoing to estimate the cost and schedule for the fabrication and installation of this buoy,” it said.
By Emmanuel K. Dogbevi