A Floating Hotel Rig

Floating Hotel
http://www.floatel.se/Gallery_2__.html

It cost about S$400 million and almost two years to build in the yard. The Floating hotel may not look like much on the outside, but it provides full hotel-like accommodation for oil-rig workers

The sparse, small one-man cabins of the floating accommodation rig, may bear little resemblance to those of cruise ships, but for oil-rig workers they are welcome comfort with similar superior 5-star hotel standard. Each of the 440 cabins comes with a single bed, an ensuite bathroom, a desk, a wall-mounted television set and a window with views of the sea. The home-at-sea even has its own sauna, movie theatre, gym and medical clinic.

This rig is often chartered by oil companies to house their drilling rig workers and attached to the rig by a bridge over a fixed well platform.

It is the world's first newly built North Sea-compliant floating hotel in more than 20 years with DP3 system.

Such rigs typically operate only in either tropical or cold waters, so 'being able to operate in two vast weather environments means better charter opportunities'.

The crews come by helicopter, landing on a helipad, before heading to the arrival lobby to check into their cabins.  Instead of in-house restaurants, there is a mess-hall that seats 220. A catering company provides three meals daily.  About seven 50-tonne containers of food are flown in every two weeks and stored in freezers and chill rooms. 

There are about 25 accommodation rigs in the world and their average age is 25 years.

It is just like a cruise ship except missing are the open pool and casino..... :)

Recently the Accom semi operates at Bayu Udan field which is under Conoco Philips and this well site was the place where our first B-class Jackup by Chiles Offshore went there for drilling contract.   The operator is ConocoPhilips, which has a 56.27% stake. Partners are Eni (12.04%), Santos (10.64%), Inpex (10.53%) and Tokyo Electric Power and Tokyo Gas (10.08% each). Bayu was discovered in early 1995, when the Bayu-1 well intersected a 155m gas / condensate column, at a depth of 897m.

This tested 2.54m³ per day of gas and 5,250bbl of condensate. The follow-up well, Bayu-2, tested 991,000m³ per day of gas and 2,000bbl of condensate from a 52m interval.

In July 1995, Undan was discovered 10km north-west of Bayu, where a 139m gross hydrocarbon column tested 1.6 million m³/day of gas and 3,900bbl condensate/day. The total recoverable field of reserves is 350-400 million barrels of hydrocarbon liquids and 3.4tcf of gas.

The 25x15km field will require approximately 26 wells over its lifetime to produce the reserves, 16 of which - including the first high-angle well in the Timor Sea - will be required before start-up. The field life is estimated to be 25 years. Commercial production began in April 2004, delivering 115,000bpd of condensates and LPG.

The project has been developed in two phases. The $1.8bn gas-liquids first phase involved the production and processing of wet gas, the separation and storage of condensate, propane and butane, and the re-injection of dry natural gas back into the reservoir.

Now the site has a remote Wellhead platform (WHP), a drilling, production and processing platform (DPP) and a compression, utilities and quarters platform (CUQ). The recovered liquids are piped to a floating storage and offloading (FSO) facility. 

The CUQ and DPP platforms both consist of an eight-leg steel jacket, slotted to accommodate topside deck floatover. The jacket dimensions are 48x50m, with a height of 90m.

The topsides were built at the Hyundai fabrication yard in Ulsan, South Korea. The CUQ topsides weigh 11,500t and are 72m long, 80m wide and 31m high, while the DPP topsides weigh 13,900t and are 65m long, 64m wide and 41m high.

The processing equipment for the Bayu-Undan fields includes three 23MW gas-turbine-driven injection compressors, two 7.5MW gas-turbine flash gas compressors and two turbo expanders. It has high-pressure (100 / 310bar) column vessels and four gas-turbine-driven generators.

The topsides were installed in November 2003 by Dockwise, under a contract awarded by Perth-based Clough-Aker Joint Venture covering their transportation and installation.

Floating storage and offloading facility

This integrated condensate and LPG storage offloading facility – the world's first at the time – can store 820,000bbl (130,000m³) of condensate, 300,000bbl (47,500m³) of propane and 300,000bbl (47,500m³) of butane. It has no propulsion system of its own and is 248m long, 54m wide, with a tonnage of 150,000dwt. Accommodation is available for 60 people.

The purpose-built FSO, named the Liberdade, was built by Samsung Heavy Industries, launched in Korea in September 2002 and permanently positioned offshore in the field about a year later. It processes the condensate and LPG, and stores them before they are loaded onto tankers for export. As such, it is designed to exploit remote oil and gas reserves that might otherwise be stranded for decades.

           Courtesy from youtube, Floatel Superior landing a personnel bridge over Njord A platform

More pictures of the rig below :



Courtesy of Upstream, 7Nov2012, Wednesday afternoon that 326 people have now been moved to the Njord A platform while 48 people tasked with emergencies duties remain onboard.The floatel is “now being prepared for removal out of the safety zone” around Njord A.

Hotels rig "Floatel Superior" has come to Kristiansund for repair and maintenance. Here moored at Bremsnes area waiting to come to the wharf at West Base, downloaded from youtube, 10Nov2012.  There were 374 people onboard the floatel when one of the anchors in the anchor rack came loose and fell, striking and bursting one of the outer ballast tanks early on Wednesday morning.

The unit began to list between 3 and 4 degrees but, once the damage had been assessed in daylight, was soon righted by ballast water being released into the opposite tank.

Nevertheless field operator Statoil ordered all bar essential workers to be evacuated, a process hampered somewhat by strong winds.