Single Point Mooring FPSO Monitoring and Forecast System Design

Abstract

The proposed paper is going to address the development of single point mooring FPSO (Floating Production, Storage and Offloading) monitoring and forecast system design. With 17 FPSOs deployed in both Bohai Bay and South China Sea, CNOOC owns one of the largest FPSO fleet in the world. Most of those FPSOs have been or will be moored to the seabed for decades. The extreme response during storm conditions could cause serious environmental problem, asset loss, personnel safety etc. In order to timely understand the tanker operation conditions and avoid potential risk of system failure when experiencing hurricanes, a monitoring and forecast system is developed for FPSO to monitor the environment conditions, tanker motions, green water, mooring tensions, FPSO heading and to predict the extreme mooring tensions and global motions before typhoon coming. The forecast system could further suggest the optimum loading condition for minimizing the extreme mooring tension and tanker motions to enhance the safe operation. In this paper, we take the Internal Turret Mooring FPSO 111 and the Submerged Soft Yoke Mooring FPSO 112 as the examples to introduce the design technology of the system. Through the integrated onboard interface information, the personnel could proactively take actions to mitigate the tensions on mooring lines and vessel motions. Furthermore, the measured mooring line tension, motion and environment history could assist the numerical studies of global performance. The details of designing or selecting the measuring and monitoring equipment, theory background of forecast system and the integrated onboard interface will be described.