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Floating production units

Are you looking for safe, reliable and cost efficient solution for your next FPU project?

From floating production units to subsea, ABB can provide innovative, next-generation solutions to help you succeed.

With a truly global reach and more than 70 successful floating production projects delivered around the world, we can offer cutting-edge professional project management for turnkey projects.

ABB's solutions for floating production units bring safe and reliable power and automation
to your vessels, lowering costs of engineering by up to 30%.

Innovative systems and reliable solutions ensure your vessels work at maximum efficiency.

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Realizing the full potential of e-houses

Our offering

Floating liquified natural gas

Floating production storage and offloading

Floating regasification unit

Floating storage and offloading

Tension leg wellhead platform

Semi-submersible floating production unit

This part of the gas production stream turns gas that has been liquefied for ease of transportation back into its gaseous form so that it can be processed to meet the desired specifications and fed into distribution grids. As with all floating production systems, it offers a flexible, low-cost alternative to fixed plants. In particular, it is useful for customers who are not ready to make the capital investment necessary to set up onshore regasification infrastructure, or have limited or fluctuating demand.

ABB supplies and installs the power and automation systems for these units. The principal challenge here is to ensure that the fuel is warmed from –160°C without endangering the vessel or its crew. This is a particular issue for floating units, which are a recent addition to the oil and gas industry’s toolbox, and so are not generally understood as well as onshore plants. ABB’s integrated control and safety system that ensures the process can be undertaken with minimal risk of leaks.

These vessels offer storage facilities to offshore oil fields, thereby avoiding the need to make a connection to onshore facilities. They take on oil through a pipeline from a processing platform, then hold it until it can be offloaded to a shuttle tanker, perhaps every month or so, and taken to a refinery.

Often, these vessels are former tankers that have been converted to act as floating storage units, and this involves some reconfiguration of the ship’s power systems and the installation of new systems, such as enhanced ventilation. ABB undertakes the installation and renovation of the ships power generation and distribution systems, and enhances them to take account of the clients special requirements, such as improved ventilation. We also install all the necessary control systems to control and measure the transfer of the crude oil.

This platform is particularly useful for developing oil reservoirs in water depths as great as 1.5 kilometers. It gets its name from the tethers attached to each of its four corners, which are moored to the sea bed in such a way that the platform doesn’t move up or down in the swell. This vertical rigidity then allows the platform to have a drilling capability, if that is required. It also allows the production wellhead to be located on deck, rather than at the bottom of the sea, which in turn makes it easier to build up a picture of what’s happening in the wellbore, and to make whatever interventions are needed to get the best possible flow assurance.

ABB has the capacity to design, build and commission these platforms. For example, it has produced the Kizomba tension leg platform that was used to exploit the 1.2 kilometer deep Pazflor field off the coast of Angola. The platforms are fabricated and commissioned onshore and then towed to the location where it is to operate.

Increasingly, the oil industry needs to carry out operations at depths greater than 500 meters, where it is impractical to erect fixed structures. The obvious problem with floating platforms, however, is that they move up and down with the waves, whereas drilling can only take place on a stable platform. A solution to this problem was devised in the 1960s: the semi-submersible floating production unit, which is fitted with underwater ballast tanks to hold it steady. Since then, the concept has been applied to many types of service and support vessel, and semi-submersibles have become the workhorses of the offshore oil and gas industry.

ABB supplies a range of services for these units, including our usual power generation, distribution and automation hardware and software which promote the optimal operation of the drives. We also supply electric propulsion systems, such as the one we installed on China’s largest heavy lifting vessel back in 2008, and advanced digital systems such as our Octopus Advisory Suite, which offers a comprehensive motion-monitoring, forecasting and decision-support toolkit to allow sea-going vessels to work safely in when stability has to be maintained.

Highlights

Optimize with execution transformation

Boost efficiency with digital transformation

Simplifying complexity

Maximizing the lifetime of your assets

FPU installations have made exploration and production of oil and gas in difficult to reach, remote
and harsh environments possible. As such, FPU installations are typically complex, requiring highest
availability and reliability, and routinely goes into cost and time overruns.

To help customers achieve shortest time-to-market without compromising on quality and cost, ABB has developed an intelligent project approach that combines intelligent engineering with intelligent infrastructure to shorten schedule, cut costs and minimize risk. In addition, intelligent applications and intelligent services ensure optimizations are carried over from project to operation.

L earn more about Intelligent Projects

With an installed base of more than 70 million connected devices and more than 70,000 digital control systems across a range of industries, coupled with its deep understanding of the oil, gas and chemicals industry, ABB is a clear partner to help companies exploit the promises of digitalization.

Proven approach and technological capabilities are in place to help customers analyze data more intelligently, optimize production, boost productivity and enhance profitability while reducing risks to schedule and safety, a paramount factor in a FPU installation.

Optimize operations by cut capex by 20-30%

Increase productivity by improve uptime up to 20% and extend lifetime of facilities by up to 20 years

Ensure safety & productivity by reduce operational risk, avoiding unnecessary cost and hazards

As one of the world's leading engineering companies, ABB works continuously to create and support a comprehensive range of products, systems and services to suit the dynamic oil and gas market.

E-house solutions
The main advantage of ABB’s E-house solutions is that all systems within the house or module are wired, tested and commissioned before shipment to yard, reducing costs, risk exposure and onsite work.

Subsea solutions
ABB is an innovator in subsea solutions, critical in powering, controlling and monitoring of subsea processing equipment vital to stimulate subsea oil and gas reservoirs effectively.

Collaborative Operations
Collaborative Operations delivers timely, manageable data-driven insights to optimize decision making through intelligent integration of data across engineering, infrastructure, applications and services, leading to reduced risk, schedule and costs.

Full range of services, customised to your needs

We are here to solve your toughest challenges through the vast resources and knowledge in our local, regional and global organizations, helping you to:

Better comply with environmental, health and safety regulations

Improve asset life by full restoration, upgrades and/or modernization

Improve plant reliability and financial performance

Conduct maintenance management with a business mindset

Increase the reliability and life expectancy of your process equipment

Manage change and create a service culture

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