Something funny happened last night. While I was sleeping soundly, apparently a bout of rough winds and seas occurred and caused some damage to rigs moored near the dock.
When I got in the following morning, there were some people discussing about the damage that had occurred. It wasn't really serious so I didn't think much about it.
Tonight it made the news, with the reported showing grainy pictures taken of some of the 'damages' to the helideck area. Apparently one of the rig shook loose and had a 'meeting' with the rig next to it. Really unlucky too as that rig is almost near completion. One of the senior drafter says these things happen always near the end of a project; can;t afford to slack even a little bit.
Today I learned a bit about the Anchorage. I thought it's some fancy place with a fancy sounding name, until one of the drilling section people told me it's just a parking space in deeper waters off the port. They go there to do some of the more demanding tests that require deeper waters. I wonder if they jack up the jackups to full operating draft? The seabed must be quite solid for this to be possible, with so many jackups being built here.
Been helping out with B302 project, so called a comfort luxury accommodation module based on semi design. The significance of this didn't really occur to me until I was invited by my boss to sit in on a little presentation done by DNV concerning noise and vibration. Apparently, they find that the rules and regulations surrounding noise and vibration limits for offshore vessels (they call them MODU - mobile offshore drilling units) are so stringent that they EXCEED that of luxury cruise liners, sometimes with quite a significant margin. So ladies and gentlemen, the most luxurious and comfortable vessel on the high seas is none other than oil rigs (that follow the NORSOK standard)! A little surprising, no?
Well granted, the 'luxury' and 'comfort' is evaluated using noise and vibration limits - you won't find casinos and other creature comforts here save for TV and rec lounges. Another interesting thing I discovered is that some of the regulations call for cabins which are so silent that privacy becomes an issue; if you do not insulate the walls enough, you can participate in a conversation going on next door because it's just so silent!
One way to solve this problem is to increase the sound insulation between cabins, but on certain situations this is simply not feasible due to the amount of insulation you would require, so another solution is to add in 'white noise' as a psychological way of artifically increasing the noise inside the cabin, which is done in luxury vessels: they would increase the noise slowly 1 hour before a planned concert then after that, gradually decrease the noise back down. The artifical background noise effectively masks any detrimental effects of the concert noise, although they did not specify what kind of background noise this was (white noise? pink noise? those fancy anti-phase noise cancellation noise?).
Today I saw some of the engineers looking up stuff that I myself was looking up when I don't understand something. Makes me feel less stupid, haha. I guess most of us, especially the newcomers, are still picking things up as we go along as this is not a field we studied in.
And today's fruity day so they gave us 4 bananas this time around. I guess the ancient greeks would call them aphrodisiacs; as for me, I haven't had banana in a long time, simply because for some reason when I came over to Semenanjung Malaysia, all the bananas sold here are those 'berangan' strain, huge and not really nice. I grew up eating traditional bananas grown in abundance in Sabah (small, very yellow) and its near impossible to find in Melaka, although I do spot them in Singapore. I guess it's not a famous trait or it's probably not grown locally and is imported from elsewhere. Whatever the case, I miss my Sabahan banana =P.
Oh ya and for the benefit of those in the future, Sabah has this interesting fruit called Tarap. Here is the picture:
My mom used to bring me to eat these at the nightmarket. I didn't really appreciate its uniqueness until today. I still remember lobbing the seeds of the tarap pass a ditch to the other side, proudly telling my mommy that in 10 years time we can go back here and harvest these fruit to eat for free.
That day never came.
On Keppel's 'incident'
Posted by Reign226 at 6:25 AM | Labels: Keppel FELS, work Friday, April 24, 2009Just now in the office, the fire alarm went off. It was quite annoying but the funny thing is all the engineers just looked at each other and continued to do their work.
After awhile, the boss came out and said what the commotion was about. See fire only run, now smoke also don't have. Everybody laugh then went back to work.
There is a certain humour in watching everybody continue to do their work as the fire siren drones on and on incessantly at the background. A sort of...inertia, I suppose.
And it stopped. But I don't think anybody cared.
My Thoughts on 27th Mar 09
Posted by Reign226 at 5:37 PM | Labels: AGIP KCO, CBR, university, work Thursday, March 26, 2009On Work: New project, AGIP KCO Cantilever Barge Rig (CBR)
Today I am starting to help the lead engineer on this project which is a cantilever barge rig for AGIP KCO, which will be operating on the Caspian Sea. Two of these will be built by my company.
This is a really interesting project. When we think of drilling rigs, there are tons of them but in Keppel FELS, we are only doing jackups and semisubmersibles. The Koreans corner the drillship market and that's that. Other drilling stations like TLP, gravity platforms, etc, don't really come up, either because they are older or because it's not commonly used.
However, a drilling barge? That's something entirely new to me and I haven't come across it in any of the literature that I have read extensively before coming here. What does it look like?
Not very impressive, to think of it. It's basically a barge, with provision of a moving cantilever allowing it to drill holes in the ground. The engineer told me the size of the hull is about that of a semisubmersible, meaning it's pretty huge. The way it drills is also similar to a semi, by taking in ballast water and letting the entire barge rest on the bottom of the sea to provide a stable drilling platform. The sea isn't very deep to begin with.
Naturally, one would wonder...why is something so mundane looking so terribly expensive?? Well the answer lies in the conditions of the Caspian Sea, of which a little National Geographic lesson is required. The Caspian Sea has been referred to as the largest lake in the world. It is a landlocked body of water supplied primarily by the river Volga, and it is surrounded by Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Russia, Iran and Turkmenistan. All the -stans. The unique thing geographically about this lake is that the northern area is shallow, about 5 to 6 meters, but drops off to about 190 meters near the middle (so the top part forms the 'shelf'). In the south, the depths go on to about 1000 meters and more! As such, the northern part only accounts for about 1% of the total water contained in the lake.
This area is particularly important because that's where the drilling barge will operate in. Typically jackups operate in water depths of up to 300 feet (about 100 meters), while the drilling barge will have an operating depth of where around 10 meters, sufficient for these waters.
Initially I thought the reason for such high costs is due to high salinity of water there, but apparently unlike the Black Sea, the Caspian sea only has an average salinity of 1/3 that of normal seawater, or 1.2%. The reason why it is so expensive is due to the harsh environmental conditions, with temperature of seawater ranging from -35 degrees in winter to 40 degrees during summer. The cyclic thermal stress and embrittlement presents a challenge for any man-made structure to operate here, let alone for years on end. On top of this, the water will actually freeze during winter, so there is a provision for an IBEEV, or Ice Breaking Emergency Evacuation Vessel.
The field to be developed is the Kashagan field, heralded as one of the greatest finds of this century. The harsh conditions however meant that the recoverable oil might not be as high as initially thought.
Bringing it in.
The second question that occurred to me was...how are they going to build this thing? The Caspian Sea is landlocked...but not completely. It is still possible to access using canal routes but it would mean the size of the rig is limited. But not completely. The analogy here would be like assembling a ship-in-a-bottle. Sections will be build (like the cantilever, living quarters, etc) then transported into the Caspian Sea to be assembled and commissioned. In this way, fabrication can be carried out off-site in places like Keppel FELS.
All the big oil companies like Shell, Exxonmobil and Conocophillips have a stake in this project. The drilling itself will probably be performed by AGIP KCO, with professionals brought on board since there is no dedicated drilling company like Seadrill or DDI for these waters.
So far the project is still in the FEED stage (Front End Engineering & Design) because it's a technicaly challenging project involving people from more than 50 countries. The initial planning stage started back in 2004 (the field is discovered in 2000), so people have been sitting around and thinking for a long while now.
Use and function of glycol injection
The project also allowed me to explore the use of glycol in gas production. It is used mainly to prevent the formation of hydrates in water-saturated gas once it is drilled out. Hydrate formation can cause the lines to become plugged and introduce all sorts of problems, so it can be elimited by either heating the lines or to introduce drying agents into the gas to remove the water; one of them is glycol, the other methanol.
The drying agents do not completely dry the gases though, that job is done in a central location. What they do do is prevent formation of hydrates long enough for the gas to reach the drying station.
Some of my thoughts today are on plagariasm and detecting it, including a free online checker for such purposes, and some thoughts on a discussion I had today with Leonard regarding the riser tensioner system found on board semi-submersibles.
University: On Plagiarism
Free plagiarism checker: http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker/
Pretty nifty tool. From personal experience, students here (my uni) love to copy and paste. I think even other universities are the same. There's nothing wrong with taking text from other people's website, but at least have the decency to use it as a paraphrase or quote rather than passing it off as your own work.
It doesn't help that some lecturers here love to look at quantity of writing rather than quality. So students are sometimes forced to pad their work with superfluous material that do not add anything other that dead weight to their reports. I try not to copy and paste, but sometimes we have to give in due to page minimum quota that have to be reached! However, I do take pains to indicate which parts of the report is quoted, and then work on original material that add my view and opinions to the quoted text. But I am sure there are some reports which can end up as a huge 'quote' after 'quote' copied from resources like Wikipedia.
I think lecturers should enforce a MAXIMUM page limit rather than a minimum because in doing so, they are actively encouraging students not to plagiarize and pad. The above tool can be immensely helpful to quickly weed out errant reports that takes material from online sources (frequently wikipedia) willy-nilly. After a few times of getting caught, most students will quickly wise up.
Imposition of maximum page limit will also focus the student on producing quality and concise writing, rather than encouraging them to talk at length producing text which end up more confusing than interesting.
I hope more lecturers can take advantage of this free tool and try to root out plagiarism as it is absolutely not doing any good in helping to raise the standard of English in students and the quality of their reports.
Work: On Riser Tensioner systems
Had a discussion with Mr Leonard this morning regarding the riser tensioner system. He's the Principal Drilling Engineer of my section and very knowledgeable on all sorts of offshore related equipments and functions, since he has been working on rigs for a major part of his life.
The riser tensioner system is unique to semisubmersibles and drillships in that they are needed only when drilling in extremely deep waters. In such conditions, the BOP stack along with christmas tree is usually installed on the sea floor. Then a riser (hollow pipe, essentially) is connected from the seafloor to the drillfloor on the vessel. The distance separating the two extremes can be in the order of thousands of feet. In such distances, the weight of the riser pulling down can be enough to cause it to buckle under its own weight.
Thus the top of the riser needs to be kept in tension (the vessel has to pull up on it) in order to keep the whole assembly from falling apart. Thus the riser tensioner is used, which consists of hydraulic sheaves connected to some wire line that is attached to the riser that pulls upwards on it. The hydraulic system allows the vessel to heave without affecting the tension too much.
Leonard commented that even the system is still quite new, as people explore deeper parts of the ocean, it might be possible that some day, we have to abandon the riser system as the depths are such that even with the riser applying tension, it will still collapse as it's just too heavy. He also commented that the riser system installation can take up to ten days, a significant amount of time for just a single operation!
I am reminded of how drillers can float drill casing by corking up one end and lowering it down the drill hole and when in position, drilling through the cork. Is it possible that one day the riser will be installed in such a way? Of course, there would have to be a system in place to admit water into the riser as the depths increased, although in such a way we could conceivably control the overall buoyancy of the riser leading to a faster installation? Currently the riser is lowered down after the BOP stack and assorted equipment is installed then guided in place using an ROV.
Will keep this in mind for future references.
