Industry best practices for addressing the challenges posed by an aging global Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) fleet have been published by ABS.
Enhancing Safety on FPSOs, Practical Considerations for Operations and Maintenance is the product of an ABS-led working group consisting of Chevron, Shell Trading (U.S.) Company, Petrobras, MODEC and SBM as well as The Bahamas Maritime Authority (BMA), the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) Registry, and the U.S. Coast Guard 8th District.
The best practices focus on areas such as tank design and arrangement, cleaning and inspection, risk-based inspection of hull structures, composite repair tracking and carrying out repairs while operating.
Operations and maintenance challenges vary widely across the global fleet of FPSOs. With many assets well over 40 years old, hull integrity and maintenance require a large portion of resources
says Matt Tremblay, ABS Vice President, Global Offshore.
Tank design for cleaning and remote inspection
Tank arrangements
To prevent bottlenecks, ABS is also implementing a requirement to include a tank to serve as an additional slop tank or take the place of any tank other than a cargo tank that is necessary to continue production in 2022. Tanks in current designs may have one or more of the following specialty designations:
To promote normal operation of the production system and allow offloads to continue while tanks are being examined, all specialty tanks such as the ones listed above should be arranged and piped to be interchangeable whenever possible when they are fitted, subject to restrictions related to fiscal metering and environmental regulations for managing oily water mixes.
Conducting repairs while operating
Executing F(P)SO structural repairs while operating is a situation all operators typically face during the lifecycle of the F(P)SO, even under the most rigid asset integrity management regimes. To overcome some of the challenges previously discussed, owners and operators must find solutions that will produce the expected results .
