Bangkok: Salamander Energy has announced that due to a damaged production riser, production from the Bualuang oil field has been temporarily shut down.
During bad weather conditions, the Rubicon Vantage FPSO drifted into the exclusion zone designed to protect the production infrastructure. The Vantage’s mooring chains then came into contact with, and damaged, the production riser resulting in a small amount of oil being observed on the surface. Production was immediately halted and operations commenced to clean up the discharge, estimated to be approximately 20 barrels. The situation was contained and all oil was successfully dispersed within a five hour period.
Further inspection work and repairs are underway. The FPSO owner has made arrangements for a new production riser to be fitted if required, which on current schedule would see production re-commence around 25 January.
Development drilling is not impacted by these events, Salamander said in a release today, and the Atwood Mako rig remains on the Bravo platform and is currently drilling the BB-02H well. Salamander will use the opportunity provided by this period of downtime to accelerate planned maintenance and has rescheduled some of the hook up work on the recently installed process modules. The new FSO, that will be installed later this year, will have a turret mooring system with 360 degree swivel capability with no need for an exclusion zone and hence the risk of this kind of incident being repeated will be removed. [08/01/14]
