The 120,000-tonne Olympus tension-leg platform began processing oil and gas earlier this year from West Boreas and South Deimos, the first two fields to come on stream as part of Shell’s Mars B development in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. The operator is no novice where TLPs are concerned, having installed the first in the region, Auger, in 1993, and followed three years later with the original Mars TLP, moored about a mile away from the new 24-slot Olympus platform.
Project manager Derek Newberry reports that the Mars B development was delivered on budget and six months early, and is poised to reach a target production peak of 100,000 barrels oil equivalent per day in 2016. The “size of the opportunity base”, revealed in deeper reservoirs through advances in ocean bottom seismic and wide azimuth surveying, justified the additional production platform, he notes.
“What’s
