Sembcorp Marine Completes World’s First Floating Storage and Offloading Vessel with a 40-year Hull Lifespan
Wednesday 9 May 2018
FSO Ailsa, the world’s first Floating Storage and Offloading (FSO) vessel with a 40-year hull lifespan, will set sail next month for the Culzean gas field in the UK North Sea.
Newly completed at the Sembcorp Marine Tuas Boulevard Yard for MODEC, a leading specialist of offshore oil and gas floating production systems, and with French oil supermajor TOTAL as the field operator and TOTAL, BP and JX Nippon as Joint Venture owners, FSO Ailsa will enter service with a hull designed to have twice the average hull fatigue lifespan of other newbuild FSOs, as verified by marine assurance company DNV GL.
A longer hull fatigue life enables ships to withstand harsher and more extreme environmental conditions, such as rogue waves, corrosion, large ambient temperature variation and thunderstorms.
Equipped with a 430,000-barrel condensate storage capacity, FSO Ailsa also boasts a 25-year continuous operability without drydocking and full compliance with strict UK safety regulations for harsh-environment operations in the Culzean field.
Sembcorp Marine President & CEO Mr Wong Weng Sun said the Group had strengthened its capabilities and production capacity over the past few years, aiming to pack more value into its solutions.
Mr Wong added that the Maersk Highlander, a high-specification jack-up rig Sembcorp Marine completed in 2016, is now deployed at the Culzean field.
FSO Ailsa is Sembcorp Marine’s first floating storage and offloading newbuild project, constructed over 22 months with a zero Lost Time Incidents record. The Group designed this vessel in-house, particularly leveraging a proprietary hull design from its subsidiary LMG Marin, a leading ship design house in Europe.