Just a few days before SBM Offshore confirmed it would supply the floater for the Petrobras Mero-2 development, Chinese yard Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding (SWS) launched the hull of the first floating production, storage and offloading vessel to be built under the Dutch floater specialist's Fast4Ward design, writes Xu Yihe.

The launch last Thursday took place 27 days ahead of schedule and paves the way for delivery of the Liza Unity FPSO, which will operate for US supermajor ExxonMobil off Guyana by the end of this year.

The hull will be towed to Singapore's DynaMac yard for integration with the topsides.

The vessel will be capable of producing 220,000 barrels per day of oil, have gas treatment capacity of 400 million cubic feet per day and water injection capacity of 250,000 bpd.

Just last month, ExxonMobil confirmed that Liza Unity will be deployed off Guyana to develop the second phase of its Liza project.

It will be spread moored in a water depth of about 1600 metres at the Liza field, which lies in the Stabroek Block, roughly 200 kilometres off Guyana.

The hull, measuring 333 metres by 60 metres and 32.8 metres, is designed to hold 2 million barrels of oil.

First oil is expected in mid-2022.

The development is expected to have a gross capital cost of $6 billion, with $1.6 billion in lease capitalisation for the FPSO, and will develop 600 million barrels of oil. The docking of the second unit under the Fast4Ward concept, which SBM awarded to SWS in 2018, is scheduled in August.

In the meantime, SWS hopes to land another major contract from SBM to build a third hull under the Fast4Ward concept this autumn.

SBM rolled out the Fast4Ward design in early 2016. The concept is based on a standardised hull design and a “catalogue” of topsides plant and processing modules.

The company says starting with the standardised hull can cut six to 12 months off a project’s development timeline.

The generic Fast4Ward hull can support topsides weighing up to 35,000 tonnes and is designed for processing capacity of between 100,000 and 220,000 bpd of liquids and up to 400 MMcfd of gas.

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SWS launches first Fast4Ward FPSO