Austrian operator OMV is restarting production from the Maari/Manaia wellhead platform, offshore New Zealand, in which a crack was found late last year.
A temporary repair has been made and now OMV, with advisors AMOG and Worley Parsons, is assessing two options for a permanent solution, with plans to select a concept this month and complete the repair by mid-2017.
The facility was downmanned on 23 November 2016, after the 1.4m-long crack was found during scheduled inspection work in one of the platform's horizontal struts, below the water line. A bad weather front was approaching and a shutdown for maintenance was already scheduled.
The field, which is in about 100m water depth, 80km offshore Taranaki, first came onstream in 2009, using Arup's self-installing DrillACE concept.
Work now completed on the facility includes a temporary repair to the cracked strut, by installing a system of clamps and tension rods, devised by AMOG and carried out by Fitzroy Engineering and NZ Diving and Salvage and verified by Lloyds, enabling the remanning of the platform and production operations to be initiated.
Further electromagnetic inspection work and ROV survey was also carried out.
As part of planned maintenance, a replacement water injection line was also installed and reconnected to the floating production, storage and offloading vessel (FPSO), which operates at the field. This work was initiated in 2Q 2016, but not completed at that time due to ongoing bad weather disrupting operations. This work will allow pressure support to be delivered to the Maari field to increase production and reserves.
Precautionary maintenance was also carried out on the three production flowlines that connect the FPSO with the wellhead platform. This is designed to extend the lifetime of the flowlines and eliminate the risk of outer layer breach, says partner Horizon Oil.
Horizon said the repairs were conducted safely, on time and on budget. Total costs were US$25 million, which included $10 million already spent on the water injection works conducted earlier in 2016.
At the time of shutdown the Maari/Manaia field was producing 10,000 b/d from 10 producing wells. The wells are being reinstated with the objective of having all wells on production by tonight.
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