MAR Consulting performed an availability study of a floating, production, storage and offloading (FPSO), which will be operating in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.
The development plan envisages the use of an FPSO with full offshore processing capabilities of the reservoir fluids. Conditioned gas will be exported to shore and tie-in to the country’s gas distribution grid. The associated light oil will be exported offshore by tandem offloading to a shuttle tank.
The FPSO storage tanks were being considered to evacuate a third-party operator light oil from a nearby field, in addition to the light oil from the FPSO’s own operating field. This is possible due to the FPSO design spare storage and offloading capacity. The light oil is of similar characteristics on both fields. Evacuation of the light oil is required for continued gas production and export of the third-party production.
The main objective of this study was to understand the effect of the FPSO’s storage and offloading availability when considering the addition of the third-party evacuation. This entailed estimation of the 3rd party production efficiency when taking into account:
- the FPSO’s storage and offloading equipment reliability;
- offloading capabilities;
- and metocean data of the area (wave height, wind flow velocity, and current strength).
For this purpose, the concept of grace period was introduced to model the inherent buffer period of the storage tanks and the nature of offloading activities. Several production profiles were included in the study with the objective to cover the different production scenarios and combinations.
The final results were both presented, based on a set of assumptions necessary at the stage of the project, in terms of:
- production efficiency (as per ISO 20815 definition);
- the average number of lost production days per year;
- the average daily oil production deferment;
- and the top contributors to the lost production.