1:200 FPSO ship Petrojarl Cidade De Rio Das Ostras

[kapteenipirk]

 

 

 

What an FPSO ship is, and the history of the Petrojarl Cidade De Rio Das Ostras.

 

This is copied mostly word for word from the "history of the real ship" segment in the models instructions. (thankfully it was in English this time, tough somewhat broken. JSC is a Polish company, so a lot of the descriptions/history of the real ship, bit's are in Polish only).

 

Technical data:

Length: 182,97m

Width: 32,2m

Draught:12,9m

Capacity: 45574 DWT

Propulsion: Diesel engine Man B&W K7SZ70 / 125BL

Production: 15,000 barrels a day

Storage: 200,000 barrels

Crew: up to 60

DNV class: Ship-shaped Oil Production and Storage Unit.

 

On 30, November 2006 a contract for a conversion of tanker Che Guevara into FPSO Petrojarl Cidade De Rio Das Ostras was signed in Gidansk.

The contract was signed by representatives of Canadian-Norwegian ship's owner Teekay Petrojarl AS and by representatives of Remontova shipyard in Gidansk.

 

FPSO what is that?

FPSO is an abbreviation from Floating Production Storage Offloading. The easiest description of the function is a floating oil processing plant.

Here are some explanations of the tasks.

Floating means the units of this class float on the water. Due to the hull construction there are two different types of FPSO - ship-like shaped and platforms.

The first ones are often old tankers like e.G. Petrojarl with some new infrastructure added on the deck. Newly built FPSO's are not shaped like a typical ship, usually their hulls are just classic "boxes" with sharp corners.

Production. This is the whole secret of this class. An FPSO is the heart of an oil-field's production infrastructure. All oil-wells are connected directly by means of valves and pipes to the ship, or to a special buoy fastened on a certain level under the water. Also The buoy the FPSO connects to enables the unit to turn according to weather conditions so that the output conduits are not extensively loaded while pumping the oil.

On the deck the gas, water and sometimes pollutants like paraffin of hydrogen sulfide are separated from oil. The basic process is warming up the unprocessed oil and evaporating the components.

Storage. After cleaning the oil goes into the tanks. That's why the tankers are adapted for this task. Gas can also be stored in the tanks, but it is also burnt due to it's small amounts. Gas may also be pumped trough special wells back into the deposit, to increase the pressure in the deposit and to make the output easier. Water distilled from the oil goes back into the sea or like the gas is pumped back into the deposit.

Offloading. As the produced oil is filling the tanks it is also pumped into tankers transporting it to the refineries on land. Offloading goes on trough a soft oil pipeline stored on a characteristic reel stern or bow of the FPSO. The pipeline is unreeled and connected to the tanker while offloading. Shuttle tankers, as the units that receive the oil are called, are equipped with special couplings that enable quick and safe connection to the pipeline.

 

Reliability in first place

Like every other enterprise, the income is the most important factor in the industry. The higher the production, the bigger the income. As every well has it's own limited flow (the oil cannot be sucked into the pipe faster tan it can be filtered in the bed), the output cannot be increased continuously, that's why the production continuity is the most important here. To keep it constant, all devices on an FPSO are tripled, in a normal work mode two are used, while the third is a backup one, it is cleaned and maintained. In an extreme case of two of the three sets failing, the one still allows for a slightly lowered production. The hulls of FPSO's are built in a special way so that they don't have to undergo overhauls as often.

 

Precious old tankers

Due to an increase in accident's with single skin tankers, a lot of companies had to withdraw them. You would think a that they would have then been scrapped, but you'd be wrong. A lot of these old single-skin tankers got converted to FPSO ships, as floating refineries spend most of there time in oil-fields are not under as heavy safety-rules and don't need double skin. That's why some of the biggest shipyards around the world converted the old tankers into refineries with kilometers of pipes and thousands of valves.

 

Che Guevara changed into Petrojarl Cidade De Rio Das Ostras

One of such tankers is the Che Guevara built in 1981 at A.G. Weser, Bremen Germany. The ship came to Remontowa shipyard in Gdansk mid December 2006. Here where installed: the refinery equipment, oil offloading devices, connections and couplings for the wells' pipes, anchor system consisting of 12 anchors and all accessories, two 30-tonne cranes, large helipad. The operating center for all deck systems is also completely new. Lot's of work was given to renovations and rebuilding of the accommodation part. After the conversions, the ship left the shipyard on 19. December 1007. On 12. February 2008 she was officially baptized and Petrojarl Cidade De Rio Das Ostras. First part of the untypically long name comes from the owner's name, the rest is a name of a Brazilian town 130 km north-east from Rio De Janeiro. This is the typical way of naming the ships by Brazilian company Petrobras (Petroleo Brasileiro S.A.), one of the biggest oil producers in the world that charters this ship.

 

FPSO - laboratory

Petrojarl Cidade De Rio Das Ostras is a rather untypical FPSO, because it was designed for extra-heavy oil production tests on smaller deposits and not for commercial production from one large deposit. High prices of oil force companies to start the production in smaller more difficult deposits that are known since long time and wait for their turn.

Old Che Gueavara will be anchored in Siri reservoir on Badejo oilfield in Campos Basin in the Atlantic Ocean at the Brazilian coast by the town Rio Das Ostras. The ship will be installed at a water depth of 95 m and 80 kilometers off the coast. Petrojarl Cidade De Rio Das Ostras will first be a lab for production size in Siri Deposit with estimated resources of 15 million barrels. This reservoir has been known to hold oil since 10975, but it wasn't used due to very high density (12,8^o API = 0,98 kg/l at 16^oC) and viscosity (300 cP = 0,3 Pa*s) of the oil. Drilling 2 km deep well (longest of this type in Brazil) and installing a special pump enabled starting of production. Purifying process of such an oil demands extremely high temperatures - even up to 140^oC. This is the first case of extra-heavy oil production on waters around Brazil and one of the very few in the world.

More than a new production system, the FPSO Cidade De Rio Das Ostras will be a lab for the development of offshore extra-heavy oil-fields such as Marlim Leste, Albacora Leste, Papa-Terra, and Maromba, all in Campos Basin. The Campos Basin is the largest undersea oil reservoir in Brazil. The resources are estimated for 11 billion barrels (1750000000 m³)

 

And there it is for you bunch of info about the ship in question, FPSO's, and other related stuff.

 

 

Paper version

 

Im pretty sure you already guessed, but this is indeed the giant papermodel project i mentioned in the WIP thread.

I have to say im quite amazed at myself for being able to get this project done, in one go no-less...well, there where some brakes here and there, but as you can see, they weren't exactly long.

 

I was searching around for images of completed JSC models to see what some of the secondary models that you don't see in the cover are, when i happened to come across some images of this model. As soon as i saw those images, i knew i had to give a go at making one myself. I was a bit worried from the start that i might be in over my head, but i was hopeful the fact that this is a type of ship i have never done before, the fact that it doesn't have the repetitive building of warship armaments, and the fact that i can't remember the last time i was this exited to get started with a model build would help me push trough and get the model done in the next couple weeks instead of next couple years.

To further motivate myself, i removed the screens, keyboard and mouse from my PC and turned the computer desk into a work-bench in an effort to remove any distractions that would cause progress to slow down and eventually become a few month pause.

And it definitely helped a lot.

 

The model was originally in 1:400 scale. I decided to scale it up as i taught it would be more fun to build and would be a little more doable in general, as the model has LOTS of small parts.

As i mentioned in the WIP thread, this model has about 1600 parts that i had to scale up in paint and then move/arrange into 60 A4 sheets, and that's not including the instructions that where an additional 9 pages.

The page/part count is an all time record for me, as-well as the time spent on it. It still ain't the biggest in size tough, that honor goes to the giant airship model that i showed some time ago.

 

More shot's of the model

Spoiler

 

 

The build started with the making of the hulls internal structure.

 

 

 

Then it was on to the deck plates and hull skin.

Had to do some trimming on the nose to get the skin to fit properly. Unfortunately there's still a visible gap, but at-least it ain't as bad as i was first.

 

 

Once that was done, it was on to the bridge (smaller details get added later on).

 

If i wanted to, i could design a few extra parts and turn it into an oil-tanker again. In this shot you can also see the instruction "wallpaper" i made by taping all the instruction sheets together.

 

After the bridge it was the turn of the power-plant/operating center (best guess) module.

A nice look at all the support-pillars, witch are just bit's of cocktail-sticks colored orange.

 

 

With the module, came the first set of pipes to build/bend.

I didn't build even close to all the pipes, but tried to at-least add enough to make it look more believable.

 

You know you've done something right when the ship can be used to hold all your tools.

 

And that''s kinda where the WIP stuff ends. The rest are shot's of the complete model.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This little model of a Super Puma is actually from JSC's Bredford Dolphin oil-rig model.

 

All in all im quite proud of the final result.

 

I hope you enjoyed taking a look at one of my crazier paper-model projects .

PS: Yes i know, i'll try and get back to the TU-16 build at some point. Unfortunately my motivation for making aircraft models versus ship models is quite low right now, so it'll take some time.

 

[Guest]

Thank you @kapteenipirk, very cool!

[kapteenipirk]

2 hours ago, Aperture Science said:

Thank you @kapteenipirk, very cool!

Thanks