The Akpo floating production storage and offloading vessel (FPSO) was commissioned in mid-2005 by Total Upstream Nigeria following the successful development of the Akpo oil and gas field, 200km south of Port Harcourt off the coast of Nigeria in West Africa. The FPSO will be permanently moored in 1,325m of water in the Akpo field situated at OML 130 (oil mining licence).
The construction of the vessel was awarded as a lump sum turnkey contract to a consortium that included Technip of France and Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) of Korea. The consortium was responsible for engineering, supply, construction, offshore commissioning and procurement of the vessel.
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Technip was the project manager and was also responsible for the initial engineering phase. HHI was responsible for the construction of the hull and also the construction and integration of the topside modules.
Some of the engineering tasks (fabrication of components) was carried out when the vessel reached Nigeria.
Construction
The vessel is 310m long, 61m wide and has facilities to accommodate 240 crew members. The hull (36,000t dry weight) was launched at Hyundai Samho Heavy Industries’ (HSHI) Mokpo Yard in January 2007. The topside fabrication and fitting out was completed in December 2007 and the vessel began operations at OML 130, approximately 150km south of Port Harcourt,Nigeria in March 2009.
The Akpo hull has a storage capacity for two million barrels of oil and the deck was designed to accommodate 17 topside modules, which includes two processing trains for the separation of oil and water.
The Akpo FPSO is expected to produce 225,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. The oil produced, which will be 80% condensate, will be transferred through a buoy, situated 2km from the vessel. The gas produced will be piped 150km to the Amenam AMP2 platform and then to the Bonny Island liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility.
Contracts
Contracts totalling $850m were awarded across several companies.
Rolls-Royce was awarded an $82m contract in October 2005 for six RB211 industrial gas turbine power generation units. These were installed to provide electrical power for the FPSO vessel. The six RB211 gensets are capable of providing the 100MW of electrical power needed to operate the subsea components of the field. The subsea set up includes 22 oil and gas production wells, 20 water injection wells and two gas injection wells.
HHI contracted Nexans to install 1,185km of offshore cables for power and instrumentation infrastructure. In addition, Total awarded a contract to Saipem to supply of all the umbilicals, flowlines and risers for the vessel under a turnkey basis.
The contract also includes EPC engineering, procurement, construction, installation and commissioning of the oil loading terminal, the FPSO mooring system and the gas export pipeline from the FPSO to the Amenam platform.
In April 2005, Cameron was contracted to provide the subsea production system including the supply of Christmas trees, manifolds, connection systems, control systems and engineering.
The main automation contractor for the FPSO is Emerson Process Management who provides digital automation architecture to digitally integrate the topside module control systems.
