By Neil Marks in Singapore
The new vessel Prosperity, which is expected to produce an estimated 220,000 barrels of oil per day, and with the two others already operating, bring in over US$1.4 billion for Guyana this year, was built to “excellence” by the operator ExxonMobil.
The Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel will soon set sail for Guyanese waters and is expected to be set up by the third quarter of the year and begin production.
The construction of the new vessel raised the bar when taking production of the last two vessels, Destiny and Unity, into consideration, said Jon Gibbs, President of ExxonMobil Global Project Company.
“Excellence – perhaps the hallmark of the Prosperity team. They simply said, ‘we are going to be better than before and we’re going to learn.’
“They took every learning from Liza Destiny and Liza Unity, openly looked at one of those and decided how they can do better, and they did,” Gibbs said at the naming ceremony of the Prosperity FPSO in Singapore.
“The completeness and the quality of this vessel somehow surpassed the extremely high bar that the Unity set just a short period ago.
“That’s the definition of excellence,” said Gibbs.
Like the Liza Destiny and Unity FPSOs, Prosperity was built by the Dutch-based SBM offshore at the Keppel Offshore and Marine Shipyard in Singapore. Construction began in the last quarter of 2020 when the hull was delivered to the shipyard by the Chinese shipbuilder Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding.
According to Chris Ong, Chief Executive Officer of Keppel Offshore and Marine, during the construction, Keppel added over 6,800 tonnes of new steel, 900 tonnes of piping, 480 km of cables, and over 25,000 tonnes of process modules while clocking over 5.2 million manhours, said Chris Ong, Chief Executive Officer of Keppel Offshore and Marine.
“I mean, it’s truly impressive. What has been done there you can be proud of and it’s really first class,” said Bruno Chabas, Chief Executive Officer of SBM Offshore.
The Prosperity FPSO benefited from Fast4Ward, SBM’s transformational programme which enabled the company to take advantage of its generic hull to deliver a vessel together as one team, and faster than ever before.
Prosperity FPSO’s topside will process hydrocarbons found in the reservoir deep below the ocean floor in Guyana and will be spread moored in water depth of 1,900 meters.
Prosperity was constructed as part of the Payara development, which is the third development within the giant Stabroek Block offshore Guyana. The block is shared by ExxonMobil (45% interest), Hess Corporation (30% interest) and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (25% interest).
The vessel will be able to store an estimated two million barrels of crude. The Payara project area has an estimated 600 million oil-equivalent barrels of crude.
The two other vessels operating offshore within the Stabroek Block– the Liza Destiny and the Liza Unity – produced a peak monthly rate of 233,000 barrels per day in December 2022.
The government anticipates that with the three FPSOs operating in the block this year, production will reach 560,000 barrels of oil per day by the end of this year.
Real GDP in Guyana, thanks to the ramping up of production in the Stabroek Block, is projected to grow by 25.1 percent this year, placing Guyana among the top five fastest-growing economies in 2023.
