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Osprey platform scheduled for July installation at Redoubt Shoal
Kristen Nelson
The challenges at Redoubt Shoal in Cook Inlet are two-fold: There are no resident jack-up rigs or derrick barges and the field is estimated to be relatively small, maybe 50 million barrels of oil.
To make the project economic, Forcenergy Inc. has had to be creative, Gary Carlson, the company’s vice president of Alaska operations, told the Alaska Support Industry Alliance May 12.
Part of that creativity involved building the platform in pieces and making it somewhat self-erecting, he said. Forcenergy got a more competitive bid by having the deck and legs built separately because more yards could bid on the job. Quarters for the platform were built in Anchorage and barged to Korea to be lifted onto the deck of the platform. Loading the installation barge onto a heavy-lift vessel for the trip to Korea was visible to other diners at Land’s End on the Homer spit May 11.
“Isn’t that ship sinking?” people at the next table asked as de-ballasting proceeded so that the smaller barge could be floated onto the heavy-lift vessel. When the de-ballasting was complete, Carlson said, only the ends of the heavy-lift vessel were visible.
Carlson said drilling an exploration well from a jack-up drilling rig would have cost $25-$26 million here, compared to $5-$6 million in the Gulf of Mexico. The portable platform was an answer to that challenge, but it would have cost $10-$15 million to get a derrick barge to Cook Inlet to set the platform, so the Osprey was designed so that a derrick barge wasn’t required. Platform primarily for rig In addition to building the platform in pieces, it was built primarily to support a drilling rig, Carlson said. The platform will be in 45 feet of water about halfway between the field and shore and “we’re going to put almost everything that you’re used to seeing on a platform on the beach” including water injection, water treating and oil treating facilities.
To reach the field from the platform Forcenergy will be using horizontal drilling and multi-lateral wells, “which have been used very successfully on the North Slope and elsewhere in the world,” Carlson said.
Most horizontal and multi-lateral wells are done in developed fields but Forcenergy will be drilling those kinds of wells early on. The company acquired very good seismic data over the area which gave them a pretty good idea of what the reservoir looks like, “so we’re going to do some of these designer wells,” he said.
The living quarters were rolled onto the barge April 28 and sea fastenings were done at the city dock. The barge was towed to Homer May 11, and will go to Korea on the heavy lift vessel. Installation barge will come back In Korea a crane will lift the quarters off the installation barge and place the deck back on the barge, then the quarters on top and the tower to one side — some four to five days work. Then 12 days back to Port Graham, where the ship will arrive in early June. The deck and legs will be attached there, and floated to location on the installation barge in early July.
Equipment on the platform was purchased in the United States and shipped to Korea for installation — Forcenergy wanted to make sure, Carlson said, that equipment could be serviced locally.
“I like to tell people this little story about NASA,” Carlson said: “They spent a million dollars to try to get an ink pen that would write in space. The Russians did it with a pencil. This is a pencil.”
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