FPSO Petrojarl I en route to Brazil

Teekay Offshore Partners has completed the upgrade of the Petrojarl I floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) unit, which has now sailed away from the Aibel shipyard in Norway.

Teekay said on Monday that the FPSO unit was en route to the Atlanta Field, which is located 185 kilometers offshore Brazil.

The water depth at the field stands at around 1,550 meters and contains an estimated 260 million recoverable barrels of oil equivalent.

The company added that, once the FPSO unit arrives at the Atlanta field, it would undergo field installation and testing prior to beginning its five-year charter contract with a consortium led by Queiroz Galvão Exploração e Produção SA (QGEP), which is expected to occur in the latter part of the first quarter of 2018.

Ingvild Sæther, president and CEO of Teekay Offshore Group, said: “This has been a challenging project for Teekay Offshore and today, therefore, marks a significant milestone for the Petrojarl I FPSO upgrade project. We now look forward to achieving first oil on the Atlanta field which will allow our customer to begin generating a return on their investment while also adding cash flow growth to Teekay Offshore.”

To remind, Aibel won a deal in August to prepare the FPSO in the company’s Haugesund yard. According to Aibel, the Petrojarl I arrived at the Haugesund yard on August 27.

Upgrade work on the FPSO was completed by Damen Shipyard in mid-August. The shipyard has worked on preparing the vessel since early 2015. The FPSO had worked in the North Sea for 28 years, when Teekay, rather than scrapping it, decided to give it a new lease of life, after finding work for it in Brazil, at QGEP’s Atlanta field.

The self-propelled FPSO spent 14 months in Dock no. 8 in Rotterdam, undergoing refurbishment of its marine systems, underwater hull, seawater system, crane booms, heating coils in the cargo tanks, and specialized steelworks in the upper and lower turret areas, which needed to be completely revised and adapted to suit the 1,500 meters deep mooring location.

Simultaneously, newly designed, prefabricated equipment skids containing heating, cooling, separation, compression, boilers, centrifuges as well as a new E-house with electrical equipment were placed on board. Interconnecting piping and cabling were subsequently installed to complete the topsides and connect it to the remaining facilities.

According to the latest AIS data, the FPSO is currently under tow in the Celtic Sea.