Apr. 2002 Vol. 223 No. 4  European Technology Round Up
Sweden
Fabricator builds high-quality offshore crew quarters

Modern oil and gas operators are moving their engineering professionals around the world to make the best use of their skills. This is driving oil companies to create a better, more uniform offshore living experience for their essential personnel, so that they can both attract and keep them, despite their being separated from family and home. Living quarters fabricated to a North Sea standard are increasingly specified for projects worldwide, as operators strive to improve the quality, safety and general living standards for offshore crews.

Emtunga, a division of PharmaduleEmtunga AB, has over 27 years of experience designing and building offshore living quarters. Double cabins with in-suite toilet / shower are becoming the norm, with 90 – 150 man capacity and 850 – 1,300 tons being the most recent demand range. The company’s unique fabrication method constructs the accommodation on the module principal section, which incorporates individual module sections built and prepared separately. The completed units are welded together into a larger module, and the full module is then fitted with necessary plumbing, wiring and ventilation systems to complete the living quarters. The fully assembled, single-lift module is transported to the field location or project integration site and lifted into position.

Offshore crew quarters being landed for delivery.

The normal life span of offshore structures is 30 – 40 years. The expected long life of oilfield accommodation modules requires tight controls on construction and the best materials. The company uses stressed-skin construction with corrugated carbon-steel exterior bulkheads that allow load carrying in all dimensions, allowing for significantly lower weight units compared to the frame and heavy-plate construction traditionally seen from shipyards or other accommodation fabricators. Building stressed-skin modules requires not only construction experience, but also the ability to design the structures for optimal materials use. With a full-time in-house engineering and architectural staff of over 70 persons, the company has the necessary resources required for any production platform.

Fabrication is currently ongoing for Norsk Hydro Grane project, a 1,400-ton, 130-bed accommodation. Detail design is well underway for the Azerbaijan International Operating Co.’s (AIOC) 200-bed accommodation for Chirag field development in the Caspian Sea offshore Azerbaijan. Also, Emtunga recently signed an order for two identical 120-man accommodation modules with AGIP-KCO (formerly OKIOC), located off Kazakhstan in the Caspian Sea. Due to the shallow water depth (1 – 6 m), AGIP-KCO will use man-made islands and place the accommodations on barges that can be floated to and set adjacent to the islands. This order is a copy of the previously delivered 120-man accommodation to OKIOC and Deutag Drilling for the second rig project in October 2001.

Other recent deliveries include a 1,280-metric-t accommodation module for ExxonMobil Norway for Ringhorne field, the 1,000-metric-t Cakerawala-field accommodation for Carigali-Triton Operating Co. (CTOC) in Thailand / Malaysia, and the 890-metric-t accommodation module for Unocal’s West Seno project offshore Indonesia. All projects were a turn-key, engineer, procure and construct contract, awarded either directly by the operator or by subcontract to the overall EPCI contractor.

Projects pending as of this writing are BP Clair; a combined 134-bed accommodation and utilities module for the West of Shetlands area of the UK North Sea; Statoil’s Kristin field of Norway; BP’s Shah Deniz in the Caspian Sea; Conoco’s Belanak in Indonesia; BP’s Mad Dog and Conoco’s Magnolia in the GOM; while ChevronTexaco has Agbami, Benguela Belize and Olero Creek. All have possible award dates in 2002.