The heads of the Eni group visit the new Saipem deep-water drilling vessel. The first job on Agip’s behalf off Bari. In September it will leave for West Africa to operate in depths of 1,000 to 2,500 meters.
The Saipem 10000 left the Korean Samsung shipyards at mid-May and arrived off Brindisi on the night of 22 June, after a 9 thousand mile journey.
Eni’s President Gian Maria Gros-Pietro, together with other high Eni Group officials, CEO Vittorio Mincato, Saipem's President Stefano Cao, Snam's President Salvatore Russo and Luciano Sgubini, General Manager of Eni’s Agip Division, boarded the vessel to be shown over it and to admire its high technology components.
Built in barely two years with an 300 million $ investment, the Saipem 10 000 is the ideal vessel for submarine drilling at great depths, ranging from 800 to 3000 meters (or 10,000 feet; as its name tells us), and it is capable of drilling oil wells as long as 10,000 feet.
Hitherto, the limit for verifying the presence of a field was some 1,000-1,500 meters, using semi-submersible platforms, undoubtedly a steadier solution for locations where no anchoring possibilities are available.
But already a few years ago, the idea was suggested in Eni’s Agip Division of drilling far deeper down in offshore areas for the production of hydrocarbons.
In that period, the low cost of oil, theoretically, did not encourage such a very expensive type of research, but the conviction that the deep-water areas would in future become the avant garde offshore sector justified the great technological commitment of Group companies.
And time has borne out the validity of these convictions.
The DP3 system (Dynamic Positioning class 3), with its six directional propellers, maintains the Saipem 10000 vessel almost immobile, allowing fine positioning and management of the extremely long drill for operating at depths of around 3,000 meters.
Everything is controlled by the computer, which constantly receives and processes Gps and sonar data.
The smallest movement caused by waves, wind or currents is monitored and adjustments are made within 2-3 seconds by orienting one of the six propellers and generating on the vessel an equal counter movement.
The DP3 system allows the vessel to operate (i.e. to drill) with a sea of force 6 and a wind speed of 50 meters a second.
If conditions worsen (that is, if eighty percent of the system’s potential is not enough to keep the ship in position, the riser is disconnected from the wellhead until such time as better conditions return.
But the technological accomplishments of the Saipem 10000 certainly do not end here; the ship is equipped with two adjacent drill towers; while one drills, the other performs those secondary operations which normally imply long unproductive pauses.
This allows operating time to be greatly reduced, to an average of 30 days per exploration well, and management costs are to a large extent optimized.
In the second place the whole drilling process is automated and controlled by two computerized workstations: operators use joysticks to lift the drilling shafts from the racks on the deck, then position them vertically and assemble them three by three as they proceed with the drilling.
The whole riser is monitored: a network of sensors connected to an optical fiber system feeds data to the computer in charge of controlling the tension and the curves that this extremely long proboscis, which weighs up to 3,200 tons, may assume due to submarine currents.
When necessary, the vessel repositions itself better or offsets the pressures with small “pulls”.
All subsea activities are controlled by two remote controlled submarine robots; while the capacity of the fuel storage tanks is designed to allow an extended operating range.
The Saipem 10000 is a ship for oil field exploration: its task is to verify the presence and the extent of an oil field. Once the extracted crude used to be burned.
Today up to 140,000 barrels of it can be recovered and stored. The first operative mission for the Saipem 10000 is the drilling, for Agip, of the Sparviero 1, an Italian oil well 50 km offshore from Bari, at a depth of around 1,250 meters (a maximum for the Adriatic sea).
But this is just a foretaste, to run the equipment in. In September, again for Agip, it will be sailing to West Africa for a series of drilling operations in the waters off the coasts of Congo, Nigeria and Angola, at depths ranging from 1,000 to 2,500 meters.
Andrea Vico
Source E.N.I
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
