CHUKS ISIWU 16 August 2013, Sweetcrude, Lagos – UK’s Tullow Oil has come a long way in Ghana since its first oil discovery at the offshore Jubilee field in 2007. On the heels of this historic find and the coming on stream of the Jubilee fields came other discoveries.
Tullow is operator (47.17 per cent) of fields in the deepwater Tano contract area, encompassing the Tweneboa, Enyenra, and Ntomme, TEN, fields, alongside Kosmos Energy (17 percent), Anadarko Petroleum (17 percent), Sabre Oil & Gas Holdings Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Petro SA (3.825 percent), and the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation, GNPC (15 percent).
The partners has taken a major step towards successful streaming of the TEN project with choice of the contractor to supply a Floating Production Storage and Offloading, FPSO, vessel to be put to work at the project.
“We are very much there on the FPSO. We just haven’t announced it. That contract is pretty much ready for signature,” said Tullow’s Paul McDade ahead of the FPSO award.
Japan’s Modec Incorporated is the beneficiary of the contract for the supply, charter and lease, operations and maintenance of the FPSO. Under the arrangement, Modec would be responsible for the engineering, procurement, construction, mobilisation and operation of the FPSO, including topsides processing equipment as well as hull and marine systems.
The Japanese firm will also convert the VLCC (very large crude carrier) Centennial J into an FPSO, which is capable of handling expected plateau production of 80,000 barrels of oil per day, 170 million standard cubic feet of gas per day and has storage of 1.7 million barrels of total fluids.
Scheduled for delivery in 2016, the FPSO will be installed in theTEN field and is designed to remain operational in the field for up to 20 years. It is the second vessel Modec will provide and operate in Ghana following the FPSO Kwame Nkrumah MV21 for the Jubilee field development, which was awarded in 2008. The company is currently operating the FPSO Kwame Nkrumah MV21 for Tullow as operator of the Jubilee field.
Toshiro Miyazaki, president and chief executive officer of Modec said of the award: “Modec is very proud to have been selected by the TEN field partners and GNPC to provide and operate the FPSO for TEN, a world class facility in a world class field. We are equally pleased to be a part of the team that will provide a needed energy resource for the benefit of the people of the Republic of Ghana.”
He said the FPSO award represented a significant milestone for his company in assisting Tullow and its partners to develop a world class oil field while also strengthening Modec’s involvement in the development of oil exploration and production infrastructure in West Africa. In West Africa, Modec has operations in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire with additional facilities operating in Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Angola and Gabon.
Tullow signed its first licenses for oil and gas exploration and production in Ghana in 2006 and made its first discovery at the Jubilee field. The company was able to turn Jubilee into production in only 40 months by the end of 2010.
Encouraged by this first success, Tullow expanded exploration in the deepwater Tano licence and made a major light high pressure oil finding in 2009 in the Tweneboa field. In 2010, Tullow hit oil in Owo, which later became Enyenra as testing wells confirmed large oil reserves across the formation. The following year, exploratory drilling campaign was extended to the Ntomme field. The reported results guided Tullow and its partners to choose a development scheme of the three fields through a single FPSO vessel.
The three oil and gas fields are lying by 1,000 to 2,000 metres water depths. They are located 25 kilometres west of Tullow’s Jubilee and approximately 60 kilometres offshore south of Half Assini on the coast of Ghana.