Gina Krog FSO gets clean bill of health

Along with Statoil receiving consent to start production from the Gina Krog field in the North Sea, the Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA) issued a “clean bill of health” for the Gina Krog FSO.

The Norwegian safety body carried out an audit of the design and fabrication of the Gina Krog floating storage and offloading vessel and found no non-conformities or improvement points.

The FSO unit is being converted from the former shuttle tanker Rangrid from the Heidrun field by Sembcorp Marine’s subsidiary Sembawang shipyard. The 1995-built tanker is owned by Teekay which signed a contract with Statoil for the former shuttle tanker conversion back in 2013.

PSA said on Wednesday that the audit took place at Teekay’s premises in Stavanger on May 9 and 10.

According to the safety regulator, the object of the audit was to gain an impression of whether the load-bearing structures and maritime systems will satisfy the regulatory requirements and ensure that the final documentation of the design and fabrication demonstrate compliance with regulations and relevant standards.

PSA added that, due to the delays in the project, many maritime systems were still in completion testing and associated documents and certificates were not available. In turn, those systems and documentation planned to review were not examined. To remind, the vessel conversion is lagging behind the overall project development.

The PSA told Statoil to arrange a meeting when the testing has been completed.

 

Gina Krog

The Gina Krog field is located 30 kilometers northwest of the Sleipner field in the North Sea and around 250 kilometers southwest of Stavanger, Norway. The field has been developed with a production platform and an FSO, in water depths of 110-120 meters. The oil will be exported via buoy loaders, and the rich gas will be sent to the Sleipner A platform for final processing.

The recoverable reserves for Gina Krog are 16.8 million standard cubic meters of oil, 11.8 billion standard cubic meters of gas, and 3.2 million tonnes of natural gas liquids.