PSA Norway Finds Room for Improvement in Knarr FPSO Construction Regulations

From 26-28 September and 21-25 October 2011, the PSA carried out an audit of Teekay Petrojarl’s (TKPJ’s) design of FPSO Knarr. The audit included the working environment and material handling disciplines.

The Knarr field (previously known as Jordbaer) is located in the northern part of the North Sea, about 120 kilometres west of Florø. The field will be developed with seabed facilities tied in to a floating production facility (FPSO).

The FPSO unit, which will have a maximum design production capacity of 63,000 barrels per day (bbls/d), is scheduled to deliver during the first quarter of 2014, at which time it will commence operations under its charter contract with BG for a firm period of either six or ten years plus extension options for a total period of up to 20 years. Under the terms of the agreement, BG has until the end of 2012 to decide on the firm period of the charter contract.

TKPJ will own and operate the facility, which requires an application for an Acknowledgement of Compliance (AoC) to the PSA.

TKPJ owns and operates several FPSOs both on the Norwegian shelf and in foreign waters. However, the construction of FPSO Knarr is the first FPSO facility which TKPJ has built for the Norwegian shelf since the construction of Petrojarl 1 in the mid-1980s.

The audit is connected to the future AoC application and is entirely directed at TKPJ as an owner and user of the facility. The objective of the audit has been to supervise that TKPJ, during construction of the Knarr FPSO, safeguards the regulatory requirements within the areas included under this audit activity.

The company’s own governing documents and studies/analyses were used as a basis during the verifications.

Results

The activity uncovered some nonconformities in relation to the regulations. These were mainly related to the following factors:

• Inadequate requirement basis for certain working environment conditions (emergency lighting, HVAC capacity and information presentation on screens in the control room)
• Inadequate expertise and inadequate resources in the project for follow-up of material handling and working environment conditions
• Inadequate overview of gap between working environment requirements incorporated in the contract with SHI and the regulatory minimum requirements, as well as a lack of concrete plans for how TKPJ will ensure chosen design solutions and package deliveries comply with regulatory requirements.
• Inadequate document control and establishment of uniform philosophies across the project’s deliveries
• Inadequate overview of nonconformities and systems to identify nonconformities from the regulatory requirements
• The plan was to place the crane cradles for the offshore cranes in a position that would prevent free visibility to the loading areas

Inadequate facilitation for material handling between process and weather decks

Factors with a potential for improvements were also observed.

[mappress]
Offshore Energy Today Staff, December 20, 2011; Image: Teekay