My name is Kent Stingl and I’m the BC-10 Project Manager.
I’ve been associated with the project since 2004.
The BC-10 is about 120 kilometres southeast of the city of Vitória it's in the Northern Campos Basin.
It’s a relatively new area not only for Shell but for Petrobras as well.
The water depth is about 2,000 metres at its deepest at the Abalone field,
it’s ultra-deep water. We’ve been deeper but each time it comes with a new challenge.
It’s a relatively benign area in terms of there’s no hurricanes or monsoons
but there is a constant swell in that area and that constant swell
is something that we had to incorporate into the design of the FPSO
and into the risers and umbilicals to be able to overcome.
BC-10 is a technically very challenging project.
It’s the first one that we’ve actually taken from the exploration phase
all the way to the production phase in Brazil.
It has a variety of different reservoir properties
a small to medium sized reservoir so not one big accumulation.
We need to tie those together and make it an economic proposition.
We used an FPSO solution because we’re a 120 kilometres offshore Brazil
and we have a very heavy oil regime, so we have heavy oil that has lots of minerals in it,
so we needed to be able to capture the hydrocarbons,
store them and then be able to transfer those to a ship where a tanker can come by
and then take those and sell it at refinery that can actually process those heavy oils.
The FPSO is actually a 1975 vintage Japanese crude carrier
that spent the first 20 years of its life carrying crude around the world.
And then it actually was an FSO which is a floating storage and offloading vessel offshore Nigeria
and when we got it, it was in relatively bad shape.
So we had to convert that vessel, we had to replace all the tanks
and for collision-resistance since most of the new vessels are actually double-hulled,
we decided to put we call “sponsons” on the sides of it.
So, on the sides of the vessel we have 13 sections of impact resistant steel
that go on the side which essentially duplicate what a double hulled vessel looks like nowadays.
This is one of the deepest FPSOs in terms of water depth anywhere in the world.
At 1,780 metres it’s an extremely deep water development.
On the subsea infrastructure again we had to combine the subsea pumping and artificial lift system
that’s an absolute first, it’s the first full field development where we’re using subsea separation
and artificial lift to optimise the production and ultimate recovery from the reservoirs.
The subsea system is all around flow assurance how can we produce the hydrocarbons
and how can we keep them flowing without them freezing, without having wax precipitation problems
and how we can boost the pressure?
So we need to boost what nature normally offers us,
so instead of having an aquifer support that pushes the oil through the rock
we need to be able to pump the hydrocarbons up to the surface.
But the pumps themselves are not very efficient when you have gas fractions in the oil
and in the water so you want to be able to separate the liquids from the gas
and then you could have the gas free-flow back naturally up to the FPSO
and then you can pump just the liquids themselves
and that’s the most efficient use of the pumps that we have.
We had up to 5,000 people working on the project on any given day during the execution phase,
primarily in Singapore where we had around 3,000 people at our peak fabricating the topsides,
installing the topsides and commissioning all of the hull systems.
So a huge team, a global team and we had people in Brazil,
we had people all over the world working on the project so one of the big challenges
was trying to coordinate all these activities across the 24-hour timezone.
In the United States we manufactured the electrical submersible pumps and we fabricated the umbilicals.
In Europe we fabricated the tubes for the umbilicals themselves.
In Colombia we fabricated the copper cores that went inside the umbilicals.
We actually moved our team, our FPSO team from the United States to Monaco
where they stayed for one year to do the detailed design work
and then took that same team and moved them over to Singapore where they were there
for the fabrication and commissioning of the FPSO themselves.
The execution of BC-10 on time and on budget really proves to the world
and everyone in Brazil that we should be or we can be the preferred operator.