South Korea: Samsung Heavy Industries Builds FPSO Unit for Teekay Corporation

Teekay Corporation enters into an agreement with BG Norge Limited (BG) to provide a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) unit for the Knarr oil and gas field located in the North Sea. The contract will be serviced by a newly-built FPSO unit to be constructed by Samsung Heavy Industries (Samsung) in South Korea, as previously announced by the Company, for a fully built-up project cost of approximately $1 billion.

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.

The Knarr field (previously known as Jordbaer) is located in the Tampen area in the northern North Sea and is estimated to contain recoverable reserves of some 70 million barrels of oil equivalents, which could increase if drilling results from nearby prospects in the region prove to be successful.

“The Knarr FPSO is an exciting project for Teekay as it represents our largest offshore project to date and is in one of our core offshore regions,” commented Peter Evensen, Teekay’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “As the largest independent operator of FPSOs in the North Sea, we are very pleased to further grow our franchise in this important offshore region and to be chosen by BG to be their trusted FPSO operator for this particular project,” Mr. Evensen added. “This project plays to one of our core competencies, which is our strong track record of operating FPSOs in harsh weather environments. The Knarr FPSO design, which makes use of Samsung’s previous experience in delivering turnkey FPSO units, incorporates top-side configuration designed for high uptime and the turret mooring system is a proprietary technology we jointly developed with Framo. Over the past several months, we have been working together with Samsung and other key suppliers on the detailed engineering specifications for the FPSO, prior to finalizing the contracts with both Samsung and BG.”

Mr. Evensen continued, “Offshore oil fields in the northern North Sea are well suited to FPSO solutions due to the deepwater geography and the lack of existing infrastructure. Given the current high level of offshore activity in the North Sea, this bodes well for further FPSO opportunities for Teekay.”

BG is the operator of the Knarr field and its partners are Idemitsu Petroleum Norge AS, Wintershall Norge ASA, and RWE Dea Norge AS.

[mappress]
Source: marketwatch, July 1, 2011.