MA D6: A Fast-Track Deepwater Project

Abstract

This article, written by Assistant Technology Editor Karen Bybee, contains highlights of paper OTC 20174, ’MA D6 - Going Beyond the Limits of Deep Water Fast Track Projects,’ by Georges Michel, Willy Gauttier, and Pierre Savy, Technip, originally prepared for the 2009 Offshore Technology Conference, Houston, 4-7 May. The paper has not been peer reviewed. The MA D6 field-development project in 1100 m of water is the first deepwater development on the east coast of India. The MA D6 project has been one of the fastest deepwater projects of its size involving a large amount of technical content in a location with minimal established infrastructure. The full-length paper describes the technical aspects of the project and the resulting designs that were selected, and it outlines the logistical issues associated with this first deepwater and fast-track project in the region. Subsea System Architecture The MA D6 field is in the KG D6 Block 60 km from the east coast of India and is exposed to the eastern monsoon from April until September and to cyclones in the following months. This limits the safe and efficient operations of offshore construction vessels to a window extending from December to April. The occurrence of cyclones led the operator to select a floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessel equipped with a disconnectable turret buoy that required a riser system designed for both connected- and disconnected-turret-buoy situations. The limited working window caused the project installation to be split into two phases: one before the monsoon season of 2008 to allow first oil on arrival of the FPSO and the second one the following year for the full production system. However, the engineering design of the whole riser system was needed at the early stage of the project to address all the interferences between the various risers during installation and operations and to define all the riser equipment in a pliant-wave configuration (Fig. 1), such as buoyancy modules, riser-anchoring piles, and tethers and clamps. The field production system is based on the production of six wells through a production manifold, the injection of part of the produced gas into the reservoir by a satellite well, and the export of the gas to the future KG D6 gas-development field though a gas-export manifold (GEM). The four 8-in.-inside-diameter (ID) flexible production risers connect the FPSO to the production manifold, the four 8-in.-ID gas-export flexible risers connect the FPSO to the GEM, and the gas-injection well is connected directly to the FPSO with a 6-in.-ID flexible riser/flowline. Each subsea tree is linked to the production manifold with 6-in.-ID flexible flowlines/jumpers, and control of all the subsea structures is achieved by a dynamic-umbilical connection between the FPSO and the production manifold and with static umbilical jumpers connecting the production manifold to the seven subsea trees and the GEM.