With inspection and maintenance underway, Brazilian FPSO expected back online in mid-April

Australia’s oil and gas company Karoon Energy has stopped production from assets connected to a floating, production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessel after running into an issue and the FPSO is currently undergoing inspection and maintenance work, which is slated to end next week.

Karoon reported earlier in the week that Baúna production, including from the Patola field, was shut-in on 28 March 2023 in “a safe and controlled manner,” due to a loss of containment incident associated with the high-pressure flare on the FPSO Cidade de Itajaí. After the FPSO operator, Altera and Ocyan, mobilised a team of specialists to the FPSO to identify the source of the leak and undertake repairs, these were completed on 30 March 2023.

However, Karoon explains that it decided, together with the FPSO operator, to extend the shutdown to undertake a full inspection and testing of associated systems, and to bring forward some of the planned July maintenance programme due to the higher-than-expected flow rates from the Patola wells, and the associated pressure that places on the FPSO processing system.

According to the Brazilian firm, the inspection and accelerated maintenance work is expected to be completed by mid-April 2023, allowing production to restart. Due to higher-than-anticipated production rates seen from the intervention programme and Patola, the company’s production guidance for the full-year 2023 remains unchanged, despite the current shutdown.

Built in 1995 at the Jurong shipyard in Singapore and converted in 2012, the FPSO Cidade de Itajaí, which is capable of operating in water depths of up to 1,000 meters, started operating in Brazil in February 2013. This FPSO has the capacity to produce 80,000 barrels of oil per day and compress 2 million cubic meters of gas per day.

The production shutdown comes two weeks after Karoon kicked off production from one of two new production wells drilled into the Patola field, with first production rates surpassing expectations. In addition, the production from the second well was expected to begin by the end of March 2023.