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Offshore

Offshore staff

STAVANGER, Norway -- Reliance Industries' deepwater MA-D6 field offshore India should ship first oil shortly, said Raymond Carlsen, executive VP for Aker Solutions at ONS this week.

The schedule has been one of the tightest for a project of this scope, Carlsen claimed. After discovering the field early in 2006, Reliance was keen to go straight to development, but no new FPSOs were available. After discussions with Aker Solutions - which had been working on the KG-D6 subsea project in the same block - Aker was contracted early last year to provide a converted FPSO. It was charged with supplying and installing the mooring systems, topsides process equipment and subsea production hardware.

"The FPSO has been converted in record time," Carlsen said, "while others have been suffering delays. It left Singapore recently and is now on the field." The vessel has been configured to handle liquids input of 80,000b/d, gas processing at 9 MMcm/d, and gas injection at 3 MMcf/d.

Aker delivered the eight-slot production manifold within eight months and six subsea trees. Subsea/pipeline installations started in January, and involved a fleet of 15 ships.

"To do a fast-track project on this scale," Carlsen said, "you can't copy what you did in the past. You must have access to all kinds of equipment that is normally not there when you want it. We were able to tap into these items via frame agreements that we had with Reliance." Another factor was Aker's new subsea tree manufacturing site in Malaysia.

"You also have to have a customer that is not thinking traditionally," Carlsen added. "These guys [at Reliance] are insistent that everything must follow the plan to the tiniest detail, otherwise it impacts delivery. If we were off from the plan, we would never have been able to deliver on time."

08/28/2008