Abstract
Corrosion failures contribute to high costs for oil and gas assets. This paper discusses the corrosion management approach for Bonga FPSO - the first deep water FPSO in the Gulf of Guinea. The paper details the step-by-step process utilized to control, identify, assess, prioritize, execute, and mitigate corrosion threats. This paper is one of a series of Bonga themed papers proposed for OTC 2024
The bedrock of the approach is the Corrosion Policy for the Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO), whose concepts will be described in the paper. The policy describes the objective, scope, responsibilities, and performance indicators for corrosion management. A detailed corrosion risk assessment which identifies all critical components was carried out. The corrosion risk assessment feeds into the corrosion management framework, which houses the asset register, material selection report, inspection plan and fabric maintenance strategy. Continuous improvement studies are done to improve inspection methods and fabric maintenance approaches; some involve the deployment of robots to eliminate human entry in confined spaces like tanks. Furthermore, audits and lessons learned are used to update the corrosion management approach to ensure corrosion policy intent is continuously met.
This structured approach has led to sustained asset integrity, robust corrosion mitigation and top quartile fabric maintenance that has led to the safe operation of the FPSO for circa 18 years, improved asset availability that has led to the attainment of 1 billion barrels of oil production and driven deployment of next generation corrosion and fabric maintenance technologies that has provided the foundation for ongoing life extension of the FPSO for another 15 years.
This paper presents valuable corrosion management insights for an offshore production facility that promotes world-class availability, asset integrity and novel technology deployment.