Eni picks FPSO for huge Ivory Coast project... choice is a first for Africa

Italian major also picks floating storage and offloading vessel for phase two of big Baleine project

Big on Baleine: Guido Brusco, Eni chief operating officer for natural resources, at the Baker Hughes 2023 annual meeting in Florence, Italy, earlier this year.
Big on Baleine: Guido Brusco, Eni chief operating officer for natural resources, at the Baker Hughes 2023 annual meeting in Florence, Italy, earlier this year.Photo: JACOPO BOTTONI/BAKER HUGHES

Eni has chosen a type of floating production, storage and offloading vessel never before seen in Africa for the second phase of its huge Baleine oil and gas project in the Ivory Coast.

The ambitious and innovative Italian major has also identified the floating storage and offloading vessel that will be deployed alongside the ground-breaking FPSO.

Eni has moved fast to exploit a deep-water field discovered in September 2021 and which holds 2.5 billion barrels of oil and 3.3 trillion cubic feet of gas.

Phase one is due on stream later this year via the vintage Firenze FPSO, the refurbishment of which has just been completed in Dubai's Drydocks World, with phase two set to start production in 2024.

A third phase is also on the horizon which will require another FPSO with capacity about double that of the two initial vessels combined.

Guido Brusco, Eni’s chief operating officer of natural resources, told Upstream that the Voyageur Spirit FPSO — owned by Norway-based Altera Infrastructure — will be deployed for Baleine’s second phase.

“We have already identified [the] FPSO which is going to be refurbished… and it will be brought on stream by the end of 2024.

“The tender process is completed. The FPSO is currently in Scotland and in June this year it will arrive in [Dubai] and sail away in July 2024.”

Brusco said that compared with the other FPSO solutions offered in the bid process, Altera’s FPSO “is a very cost-effective proposition [so] we went for it”.

Cylindrical hull

Eni’s milestone decision represents the first time that an FPSO with a cylindrical hull will be installed in African waters.

Brusco sees no potential problem related to the behaviour of a cylindrical hull in West Africa’s metocean conditions.

“That’s not an issue at all. We have experience of a cylindrical FPSO in Goliat [in Norway]. We know how to operate it.”

The Voyageur Spirit is currently moored at Kishorn in Scotland.

According to Brusco, the cylindrical FPSO will be designed to handle 40,000 barrels per day of oil and 45 million cubic feet per day of gas from eight wells.

This output would supplement the 15,000 bpd and 25 MMcfd forecast to be produced by the Firenze unit from three wells, starting in mid-2023.

Voyageur Spirit can currently handle 30,000 bpd of oil and 38 MMcfd of gas, with the ability to store 270,000 barrels.

However, Brusco said Eni decided to secure an FSO to provide additional storage capacity for the phase two production unit.

“We have identified the FSO and it will be coming to the same yard [Drydocks World-Dubai] in October this year” for minor refurbishment work.

He said the FSO will be Altera’s Nordic Brasilia which is currently trading as a shuttle tanker in the North Sea.

For Baleine’s next phase, Eni is in the engineering phase but expects the third FPSO to have an oil production capacity of up to about 100,000 bpd, assuming the field’s total production capacity is between 130,000 and 150,000 bpd.

Brusco said that deploying a trio of production vessels on Baleine limits the complexity of a subsea production system that would otherwise be needed if fewer vessels were deployed.

“Three is the magic number of FPSOs because this will allow us to develop the central area and the two flanks… without having a massive subsea network.”

In an effort to discover more resources, the company plans to drill a step-out exploration well close to Baleine in either late 2023 or early 2024.

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Published 6 April 2023, 13:53Updated 12 April 2023, 13:45
EniBaleineIvory CoastGuido BruscoAfrica