bpTT floors gas pedal

Cannonball, Trinidad and Tobago’s first locally-made natural gas production platform, has prompted bpTT to order 12 more platforms valued at US$500 million, to develop its gas fields off the island’s east coast, said CEO and Chairman Robert Riley Riley  was speaking at the formal commissioning of the platform at Trinidad Offshore Fabricators Company (TOFCO) fabrication yard at LABIDCO Industrial Estate, La Brea, last Friday.

The Cannonnball, which boasts an 850 tonne deck  or “topsides,” as well as a 950 tonne jacket, has a production capacity of one billion cubic ft of natural gas per day and is primarily intended to service bpTT’s 37.8 percent processing rights in the forthcoming Atlantic LNG Train IV facility. Two initial wells are expected to be drilled, each capable of delivering some 350 million cubic feet of gas per day and will be used in the development of bpTT’s fields off Trinidad’s East Coast. The US$54.5 million Cannonball, which has been rated among the world’s highest gas rate unmanned platforms, will be fully controlled and monitored from the Cassia B processing hub.

The platform, which will be powered by technologically advanced micro-turbine generators, supplemented by solar energy. It’s design, which has been described as  a “cookie cutter” approach, is expected to make construction of future platforms more cost-effective in the long term and secure. Fluor/Summit operations manager, Dan Spinks, described the platform as a “successful project that has been delivered safely, on schedule and on budget.” Spinks, whose company was also selected to perform modifications to Beachfield, a subsea pipeline, and Cassia B, also reiterated that both the platform’s engineering design and fabrication could be repeated “over and over again.”
 
“The engineering design as well as fabrication of the Cannonball platform is now the benchmark for future bpTT projects and we are already setting our sights on more aggressive targets,” he said. Spinks said the project also signalled the establishment of a “full service project delivery system” that was capable of producing successful projects from beginning to end. According to Riley, the platform was designed around BP’s new concept for gas field development — the “hub and spoke concept” which requires construction of small satellite structures around a central platform hub. He said that given present calculations, the company would require “ten to 12 more spoke platforms over the next 20 years, depending on the rate of gas reservoir development.” 

He praised the performances of local engineers led by Curtis Mohammed, project general manager, whose local team contributed 34 percent of the total hours spent on the engineering design stage of the project. He said while this may seem modest, “It is a sterling achievement given the fact that this was virgin territory for our local engineers.” The technical ceiling for local content in design engineering at this time, is about 70 to 75 percent, he added. The energy giant’s local head also praised local craftsmen, saying that after undergoing appropriate training,  their performances were described as “superior” to their US counterparts. “For example, in the US, there is normally a 3 to 4 percent repair rate on fabrication jobs. The rate on this site has been as low as 0.015 percent — a tremendous achievement,” Riley said.

He said that while the company could have imported the platform from a foreign company for some US$10 million less,  bpTT’s objective of increasing local content was “well worth the investment.” He added that with astute planning and management, costs could be reduced to US$3 million within 5-7 years and eliminated soon afterwards.  The gas production is expected to begin operations by October 2005.