Catastrophe In The Heart Of The Sea
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by gCaptain in 2016 and is being republished now because it’s lessons are timeless and possibly more relevant in 2022 as today’s ships...
We thought this weeks ship photo was pretty cool. It shows the newly constructed USAN Floating Production Storage and Offloading unit (FPSO) being positioned at the Usan field offshore Nigeria.
Built by Hyundai Heavy Industries, the FPSO Usan is one of the largest units of its kind. In April, the FPSO left on its 3-month journey under tow from the HHI shipyard Ulsan, South Korea, around the Horn of Africa, and eventually connecting to the tug Fairmount Glacier for final positioning and installation offshore Nigeria. Nine weeks of continuous heading control later, the unit was successfully installed.
The Usan FPSO has the capacity to refine 160,000 barrels of oil and 5 million cubic meters of gas per day and can store 2 million barrels of oil. The facility is 320m long, 61m wide, 32m high and weighs 116,000 tons.
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