Innovations in a Floating Production System for Optimizing Costs

Abstract

It will be presented some developments for a ship-shape type floating production system to minimize installation and operating costs for a scenario Polo pre-salt Santos Basin. In that scenario, there are economic advantages using large diameter rigid lines for oil production and also requirements about oil treatment which increases the process plant weight and area at the production unit. To deal with those new requirements an unconventional concept was developed. The concept is designed to operate with large diameter free standing steel catenary riser connected to a structure that may be disconnected from the hull. The possibility of disconnection allows the assessment of this solution in other harsh environmental scenarios, like hurricanes areas, where being disconnectable is required or an advantage in terms of safety. The hull form is designed using an optimization process with genetic algorithms that took into account 7 parameters, having analyzed thousands of possibilities in the proposed scenario, focused in minimize steel weight to minimize the platform construction cost. Based on this solution, hydrodynamic analyses were performed to check the interference effects between moonpool and the riser support buoy inside the moonpool. Based on the optimization results, the advantages and disadvantages of this solution are pointed out at well the estimated cost reduction, which also considers assessments in different scenarios by Monte Carlo approach.