Bluewater's Haewene Brim Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO), moored by means of an internal turret mooring system in the central North Sea since 1998, ran out of its original 15 years design life. Good field performance and the tie-in of another field resulted in a targeted lifetime extension for the FPSO of 18–20 years. In the late 90s a number of turret mooring systems, with a typical design life of 15 – 20 years have been installed in the North Sea. A number of these, currently or in the near future, might also be subject to lifetime extension programs. The technical challenges experienced during the lifetime extension project of the Haewene Brim FPSO mooring system will be discussed in this paper. The main objective for the lifetime extension program of the mooring system was twofold: to design a mooring system which allows for continuous operations for the extended lifetime and to maximize the utilization of existing components. A number of the findings, steps of the design process and challenges are described in this paper and solutions are presented. This is complemented with a discussion regarding mooring integrity issues (birdcages in spiral strand wire sections) faced with over the last few years, which made it more challenging to fulfill the original design life and to design a new mooring system within the targeted boundary conditions.
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