Gumusut-Kakap, a Shell megaproject located
in the deep, oil-rich waters of Malaysia.
Gumusut's going to change the landscape for Malaysia.
24,000 tonnes of steel floats on the surface…
…anchored to the ocean 1,200 metres below.
As an engineer, you cannot be more excited
to be involved with megaprojects, as we call it.
It's a world class facility by any measures.
Energy is vital to our daily lives,
and as the world's thirst for energy continues to grow,
the challenge is to find and develop new sources.
This is the story of how Shell's Gumusut-Kakap field
is helping to meet this energy challenge,
with an expected capacity to produce up to 135,000 barrels of oil a day.
It is producing much-needed energy for the region
and boosting skills and jobs.
So, how was the project brought to life?
Shell has been in Malaysia for over 120 years.
At the start, of course, the oil industry was very different.
Over the years we have progressively gone deeper
and into more complex and challenging environments.
Shell, as a global company, has taken that knowledge
and deployed it into Malaysia.
Working offshore is never easy,
but working in the dark, cold waters at a depth of 1,200 metres,
presented the team with an immense challenge.
Normally if you take shallow water as a reference,
typically the structure stands on the sea bottom
and things are accessible with divers.
With deep-water you can't do that anymore,
so you have to design things that you can only touch it
with what they call remotely operated vehicles
so like a robot that floats to turn valves 1,200 metres below.
Drawing on its expertise in deep water,
Shell decided to use a ‘Floating Production System’
where an oil platform floats like a boat
and is anchored to the ocean floor with steel tendons and anchor chains.
It floats there, offshore.
It's held in position by 12 big anchors all the way down,
1,200 metres deep,
and it processes the hydrocarbons.
The oil gets sent to the beach via an export pump
and a 200 kilometre pipeline,
and gas and water get to be injected into the reservoir
and that will help getting more hydrocarbons out of the ground
at the end of the day as well.
If you look at the Shell global portfolio of deep-water projects,
this is probably one of the most complex ones.
So it means that we have to bring in new technologies
both from the subsurface and surface point of view.
So it's really about proving that the technologies
that we have had developed or applied somewhere else
are actually working for Gumusut.
It also ties into how we operate as a group
where you tap into local expertise and local talent and local capability
as much as possible,
supplemented and supported by global processes
and global expertise that exist elsewhere.
The project led to many firsts
- and not just for Malaysia.
One of the records was definitely the superlift.
In the yard we built the hull from the ground up
and we built the topsides from the ground up,
but at some stage it had to be mated
and the way we went about it was to lift the topsides
so we had about the weight of 23,000 tonnes
that we had to pull up about 45 metres
and that then allowed us to slide the hull under it
and get it connected,
so that was definitely the biggest lift in the world.
Gumusut-Kakap is a remote facility 120 kilometres offshore
and home to 140 people,
so the highest standards of safety are strictly adhered to.
Safety is clearly very important for our Gumusut operations,
number one on everybody's agenda.
It's not just safety; as well though, we have a community out there.
We're also concerned about the welfare of the staff,
that they're able to focus on their job
and we know that they're able to go back to their families safely
at the end of each tour of duty
and are able to say 'I work in a safe environment.'
Gumusut-Kakap is more than just
Shell’s first deep-water project in Malaysia.
It opens up the potential for the creation
of a major deep-water hub in South East Asia,
a hub that can help meet the world’s energy challenge.