GMC Ltd. has just completed the basic design of a self-installing buoyant tower for the Prinos field development, located in the northern Aegean Sea, offshore Greece for Energean Oil and Gas.
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Image from GMC Ltd. |
The design brief was twofold to find a way to extend the life and utility of the existing Prinos infrastructure, and to find a cost effective and flexible solution for the green field expansion of the existing Prinos facility.
The existing wellhead platforms (Prinos Alpha) was reanalyzed, and strengthened to accommodate drilling using the Energean newly acquired and commissioned Energean Force (formerly Glen Esk) tender assist drilling rig. The focus was on finding an efficient solution to extending the utility of the existing infrastructure. GMC delivered a design for the retrofit of the existing platform that was both efficient and leveraged the local supply chain and workforce to deliver the platform modifications.
For the greenfield solution, GMC developed a full field plan to connect the greenfield facilities to the existing offshore processing facility (Prinos Delta), including j-tube and riser retrofits.
GMC says that its greatest contribution to the efficiency of the whole development project was a reconfigured and redesigned GMC buoyant tower, which has been engineered to accommodate the unique challenges of the field location. Away from any oil and gas centers, the challenge was to develop an offshore facility design that could be fabricated locally and self-installed. The key benefit of the design was that it could be installed without the use of heavy lift vessels, and using only locally available marine assets, GMC said.
“GMC has succeeded in leveraging our 20+ years of experience in working on technically challenging projects to deliver a bespoke solution for both the brownfield and the greenfield challenges faced by Energean,” says Vibor Paravic, GMC general manager. “We look forward to the next phases of the project.”
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