Magellan’s journey

GustoMSC’s sixth-generation Magellan-class drillship.Images from GustoMSC

Ferdinand Magellan became the first to circumnavigate the globe with a brutal three-year journey beginning in 1519. Almost 500 years later, GustoMSC built his namesake drillship by drawing upon experience the explorer never had the fortune of having.

GustoMSC unveiled its new Magellan-class ultra-deepwater drillship in June. Magellan Design Manager Sjoerd Hendriks calls the new ship, a seventh-generation, an “integrated design,” noting that the company selected the best of its technology from previous generations while conforming the newbuild to new regulations and operator wish lists.

“You focus on added functionality for the user and don’t let your design choice depend on a yard preference or major equipment supplier, leaving freedom of choice. The end user has the key interest in the designs,” he explains.

Uptime

The Magellan is the largest drillship the company has ever designed, although at 243m-long, the vessel could still be considered compact when looking at the functionality and options put in these dimensions, which Hendriks says makes it more efficient. The drillship’s thruster retrieval system system allows the retractable forward thrusters to be retrieved above deck for full maintenance while the drillship is in the field.

It also features a “more elaborate” power generation system. If the engine room were to catch fire, GustoMSC says the Magellan-class has more power available to handle possible emergency situations. A large fuel tank and the capacity to carry a high variable load allow the Magellan class can also be autonomous for at least 100 days, helps to safely support remote operations.

Features

The drill floor of the Magellan-class drillship

Its streamlined style still houses a 7500sq m deck space, with 1500sq m reserved for completion operations and 700sq m marked for enhanced drilling technologies, such as dual-gradient and managed pressure drilling. That amount of space is purposeful.

Hendriks said that oftentimes, operators and their equipment are ancillary concerns to designers, finding themselves out of space for their ever-increasing cluster of equipment necessary. One of the main changes in the Magellan class is not only the space it occupies, but how that space is allocated.

“It is not uncommon for operators to come at the end of the process,” he says. That’s why we increased the size and we increased it in the right places. It’s not only a factor of scaling, but thinking ‘Where does the contractor and the operator need that space?’ And that’s where we put it.”

GustoMSC says that the increased deck space is also a safety feature, enabling space for more emergency response equipment.

Hendriks said that GustoMSC tried to allow for future needs and customizations in the design, in a few ways, so it is already equipped for the future: The Magellan-class has space for two full 8-ram blowout preventer stacks, able to accommodate up to 20,000psi, and can drill in water up to 15,000ft, well past the market limit (12,000ft).

“What is important about 20,000psi working pressure …that’s about rating of piping, it’s about all of the associated equipment. If you have a well that has that pressure rating, all the associated systems and equipment are also heavier and more demanding. And that is what you need to make your vessel ready for,” Hendriks says.

Hendriks said that he had been cataloguing ideas for a new drillship, without knowing whether these ideas would ever float. “They’ve been on paper and in the back of my mind for a long time. I didn’t know it, but they would materialize in this ship,” he said.

GustoMSC says that the drillship class is ready for contractors to tender, adding that it has “serious interest from a number of leading drilling contractors.”

A history of innovation

With its 20,000psi-rated drillship, this is not the first time the fully-independent design company has found itself at the front of the industry. When the offshore industry started up in Western Europe in the 1950s, GustoMSC – then Gusto Shipyard – was one of the first shipyards to embrace the burgeoning business, Marketing Manager Mattijs Faber said. It was the first in the world to design and build a DP drillship and the first in Europe to design and build a jackup drilling rig.