The Egina Field is a deep offshore development located in OML130 in Nigeria and operated by Total Upstream Nigeria Limited.
The development is located 150 kilometres from the coast in 1550m water depth and includes a spread moored FPSO of 240 PoB, associated offloading calm buoy, two production loops connecting six subsea manifolds with twenty-one production wells and three injection lines connecting twenty-three water injection wells.
The Egina field is being developed by Total Upstream Nigeria (24%) in partnership with the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, CNOOC (45%), South Atlantic Petroleum, Sapetro, (15%) and Petrobras (16%). Egina is the third deep offshore development of Total in Nigeria. The field is currently under development and production is scheduled to begin in 2018.
The Egina field was initially planned to be developed as a subsea tieback to the Akpo FPSO. Major discoveries in the area however, led to the standalone development of Egina.
Basic engineering studies of the field began in 2008. The development plan was approved by the Nigerian authorities in 2009.
In October 2014, Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) received a turnkey contract from Total for the Egina FPSO. The scope of the contract includes design, procurement, construction (which includes Glass Fibre Reinforced Epoxy, GRE), delivery and trial operations.
For the installation of GRE lines, SHI contracted NOV Fiber Glass Systems, BOG’s technical partner for GRE. NOV contracted the provision of supervision of the project to BOG. We provided one of our NOV-certified personnel to supervise and train jointers for SHI in order to qualify the jointers and bonders to do the bonding of joints on the Egina Project.
The training to qualify bonders lasted eight (8) days. These jointers were taken through theoretical and practical sides of bonding of joints. The theoretical aspect of the training covered the following: jointing systems, tooling and equipment, handling and storage, cutting calculation, etc. While the practical training involved the fabrication of 3 inches, 8 inches and 16 inches’ spools. Each jointer did three joints of each size on a spool to qualify them to bond pipe sizes up to 24 inches for 20 Bar.
The spools were pressure tested for 27 bar for twenty-four hours and were successful. Afterwards, rupture tests were done to see how well the adhesive wetted the bonded surfaces. These were also successful.
Other critical aspects of the training included monitoring to ensure that approved procedures were followed while carrying out the bonding, visual inspection of bonded joints done, advise on job clarification and signing of documents.
The Egina field is expected to come on stream in 2018 and will produce at a peak production rate of 200,000 barrels per day, while the production capacity of the FPSO will be 208,000 barrels a day.
It will be recalled that BOG also supplied about 15,000 metric tonnes of subsea line pipes from Vallourec for the same project in 2014, and BOG also worked with Vallourec on the provision of risers and flow lines for this project.
Setting pipe shaver
Surface preparation for an 8 inches spigot
Dressing the bead of the bonded elbow – pipe joint
BOG Training Instructor and Supervisor-GRE, Godwill Renner, instructing trainees on alignment check of a bonded spool
Application of adhesive on the spigot and bell of a 16 inches fitting
Curing Activities of bonded joint