New FPSO to be named today
THE First Lady, Mrs Lordina Mahama, will today officially name the new Floating Offloading Production and Storage (FPSO) vessel at the Jurong Shipyard (JSL) in Singapore to pave the way for the production of oil in the Tweneboa-Enyenra-Ntomme (TEN) fields in mid-2016.
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The vessel, which has been named after the late President John Evans Atta Mills, will set sail from Singapore at the end of the year and arrive in Ghana in February 2016.
In attendance will be the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Mrs Marietta Brew Appiah-Opong; the Minister of Petroleum, Mr Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah; the Tullow Group Chief Executive Officer, Mr Aidan Heavey, and the Managing Director of Tullow Ghana Limited, Mr Charles Darku.
Others will be the Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), Mr Alex Mould; Mr Samuel Atta Mills, brother of Prof. Mills, TEN project partners, officials of MODEC and many others.
The First Lady and other dignitaries will tour the FPSO, which was built with contribution from Ghanaian contractors, after the naming ceremony.
Turret-Moored FPSO
According to Tullow officials, FPSO Prof. John Evans Atta Mills is a turret-moored FPSO.
This means that the turret is the section that is anchored to the seabed and does not move. Thus the rest of the vessel is able to swivel, or weathervane around the turret according to tidal conditions.
The turret is also the section where the umbilicals, risers and flowlines – the tubes that connect to the subsea production system on the seabed – attach to the FPSO.
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The FPSO Prof. John Evans Atta Mills has the largest turret of any existing FPSO vessel in the world.
The TEN Project
The $4.9 billion TEN Project is developing three offshore oil and gas fields to start production in mid- 2016. The project name was derived from the names of the three fields, Tweneboa, Enyenra and Ntomme (TEN), which lie around 60 kilometres off the coast of Ghana’s Western Region.
The development will consist of around 24 wells in total – a mixture of water injection, gas injection and production wells.
For a start-up, 10 wells will be required and these have already been drilled.
The FPSO will be anchored above the fields to receive the crude oil and gas.
It is expected to develop 300 million barrels of oil over the 20-year lifespan of the field. Around 80 per cent of this is oil and 20 per cent gas.
The TEN Project is a joint venture led by Tullow Oil. The partners (and their percentage equities) are: Tullow Oil: 47.185 per cent; Kosmos Energy: 17 per cent; Anadarko Petroleum Corporation: 17 per cent; Ghana National Petroleum Corporation: 15 per cent and PetroSA: 3.815 per cent
POD
In the TEN Plan of Development (POD), which was signed by the government of Ghana in 2013, the TEN Partners are committed to maximising local content throughout the project and have since adhered to that principle by making it possible for Ghanaian engineers to partake in the building of the FPSO while parts of the FPSO were developed by local contractors.
Writer’s email: mabel.baneseh@graphic.com.gh