THE floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel, Liza Destiny, arrived off the coast of Guyana last week, completing its trip from Singapore. The ship will be anchored in the deep waters of the Stabroek Block at the future site of the Liza Phase 1 project. When it comes online in early 2020, it will be the first well to produce oil offshore Guyana.

FPSOs, like the Destiny, are commonly used in extreme deepwater operations like the Stabroek Block, where a permanent platform attached to the seafloor would not be practical. Many of them are already in use around the world, particularly off the coasts of Brazil and West Africa.

While located offshore, FPSOs often create a surge of jobs on land. They require multiple full crews to help them operate round-the-clock and they are resupplied by boats from shore bases like the one in the Houston District, East Bank Demerara.

The Liza Destiny will serve as the primary production platform for Liza Phase 1 operations. That means that preparing the ship and the undersea components of the oil production facility to operate safely and effectively will be a critical focus for the oil companies and their contractors over the next few months. Even though the Liza Destiny has arrived, there are still several steps that have to be completed before production can start next year.

First, it will have to be securely moored. The mooring system has to keep the ship relatively steady in all weather conditions over the duration of its work. The steel cables of the mooring system will attach to the sea floor in multiple places to help keep the ship in place.

Once the Liza Destiny is on site, it will be attached to the risers—a system of flexible pipelines that attach the ship to the control systems and wells on the ocean floor. For Liza Phase 1, there will be three production risers to carry oil up to the ship, two water injection risers to help extract the oil and one gas injection riser to help maintain pressure and aid the extraction process.

The risers are part of the “SURF” system, which stands for subsea umbilicals, risers and flowlines. All these complex underwater systems are attached to the sea floor where they are mostly installed by remotely operated robots, due to the enormous depth and water pressure. They will all need to be completed before the Liza Destiny can start production.
The SURF system includes the command and control systems for the wells themselves as well as a vital “umbilical” that carries cables for control, monitoring, and data analysis back up to analysts, engineers and geologists on the ship.

Once the oil is fed onto the ship, it will be measured at several different points, supervised by auditors. All off loadings from ship to export tankers chartered by the buyers will be monitored by government official, witnesses, and measurement specialists onboard, and as a further protection, also independent witnesses hired to validate the volumes on behalf of the buyers and sellers. Under the terms of the production-sharing agreement, Guyana will get 50 per cent of the profits from that oil, as well as an additional royalty based on total production. Meanwhile, on the deck of the Destiny, technical specialists will be busy continually optimizing the flow and pressure of the oil, monitoring equipment for safety and analyzing the geologic conditions of the reservoir.

Within five or so years, there could be as many as five of these ships operating at similar sites across the Stabroek Block, and that doesn’t include any major future discoveries on the block or neighboring blocks. In August, Tullow Oil announced a major find on the Orinduik Block that could be the centre for a cluster of future discoveries and eventually a production project of its own.

After a testing period, the FPSO should reach its full production capacity of 120,000 barrels per day. But that will only be a small part of the 500,000 to 750,000 barrels of production per day that are expected to be produced in Guyana by the mid-2020s.

Exxon and its partners have stated publicly that they expect to produce at least half a million barrels per day on the Stabroek Block alone. Already, plans are moving forward for other projects with their own FPSOs at the Liza Phase 2 and Payara sites.