What do you need to know? An FSPO is a ship shape floating production vessel (often built from a converted oil tanker). The vessel is moored in place and connected to the subsea wellheads by flexible risers. Export is by shuttle tanker or ocassionaly by a conventional export pipeline. The vessel may be spread moored (in calm waters) or moored with a turret, allowing the vessel to weathervane, in harsher waters. Turrets may be external or internally mounted; internally mounted turrents are more expensive but can cope with higher sea states etc.
Process facilites can be anything from just a 3 phase separator train with gas to flare to full export spec process systems with full water and gas injection systems: a big (say 50m x 150m) FPSO has a lot of deck space!
FPSO are very flexible; they've been used in thousands of meters of water offshore Brazil to a few meters of water offshore Nigeria; they can cope with as few as 2 -3 wells to as many as 60 or so, and throughputs can vary from a couple of thousand bbl/d to hundreds of thousands bbl/d. Storage can also range from a few thousand barrels to over a million barrels- some of these things are huge!
FPSOs are popular, expecially on marginal or small fields as they are cheap (especially conversions of existing tankers). One obvious disadvantage is they use subsea trees, and another is the lack of drilling/ workover facilities (although there are proposals for FDPSO- FPSOs with drilling capabilites). It is even possible to hire them from people like Oceaneering or Bluewater (do a Google on these companies to find out more about leasing an FPSO).
There's a poster of all the FSPOs in the world, with photos and technical data in the September issue of Offshore (I've just got it- my post chases me around & is ususally late!). If you can't get hold of a paper copy, it's not yet on their website (
While checking out FPSO technology, you might also look into spar, tension leg platform and semi-submersible vessel technology for oil and gas production platforms.
I looked at all the responses and they were helpful in building a good picture. I work for a CCI Valves - superior control valve manufacturers, for severe service applications. I am trying to learn more about FPSO's and the Control valve requirements to assess whether there is a market for our DRAG technology. Does anyone have any information on this or know where to find PIDs of any example FPSO ?
I doubt whether you can obtain P&IDs via the Internet, since they are normally confidential.
However, when you look at the production process this will not be fundamentally different from oil/gas production processes that or not located on a ship (e.g. on fixed platforms or onshore plants). So if your DRAG technology is used on oil/gas producing plants you can be pretty sure that they can also be used on a FPSO...
