allAfrica.com: Shell's EA Field Resumes Gas Supply to LNG Plant: “THE Shell operated EA field has resumed gas supplies to the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas plant on Bonny Island in Rivers state five months after it discontinued owing to power supply problems.” (ShellNews.net)
Hector Igbikiowubo
Vanguard (Lagos)
Posted 27 October 2004
THE Shell operated EA field has resumed gas supplies to the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas plant on Bonny Island in Rivers state five months after it discontinued owing to power supply problems.
A recent edition of the Shell Bulletin, an in-house journal of the company disclosed that gas production from the EA Sea Eagle, an FPSO vessel picked up in early September after the blade corrosion problems in the three affected generators were rectified.
The EA field has a total of five generators, and four of them are required to provide power for the compressors to compress natural gas preparatory to export from the FPSO Sea Eagle.
The company disclosed that during the three months period the company's offshore team worked to resolve the problem, oil production from the field had to be reduced slightly and this resulted in the deferment of 10,000 barrels per day.
The company pointed out that while working with the generator manufacturers, the offshore team ensured replacement of the gas turbine units in two of the generators.
This enabled the offshore team to successfully restart gas compression and resume gas export from the Sea Eagle, while oil production has reached normal levels of more than 100,000 barrels per day.
Mr. Malcolm MacGregor, the company's production superintendent had while speaking on the development disclosed that all the five gas turbines which powers the generators will be changed by November.
He disclosed that a detailed investigation will be carried out to see what really went wrong and fashion out ways and means to avoid a recurrence, adding that the manufacturers are deeply involved in all the fault finding and rectification processes.
"These generators are designed by the manufacturers to serve at least 25,000 working hours but the three had only achieved 9000 at the time the problem occurred. It is a case of premature failure and initial investigations blame it on a variety of factors," MacGregor disclosed.
In a related development, the company also disclosed that it has trained over 90 field technicians in its western area operations on maintenance of Sulzer pump, a critical production equipment used in transporting crude oil.
It was disclosed that the training exercise has been extended to cover other facets of crude oil production activities, including instrumentation and metering.
The training was organised by the company's production maintenance services (West) in partnership with the corporate learning development and this has taken place in several field locations including flow-stations at Okpokushi, Olomoro, Odidi, Egwa, Batan, Jones Creek and Sapele.
While speaking on the training modalities, Mr. Olusola Adebisi, the training organiser disclosed focal points in production maintenance services and identified areas requiring urgent competence development for field technicians based on asset integrity reviews and technical audits, field experiences and feedback from the asset teams.
"The scope of the training and assessment formats were developed in agreement with the skills development team which has the responsibility for assessing the competence of the technicians after the training exercise," he pointed out. Also speaking, Mr. Fred Ekuase, the company's learning advisor and co-organiser of the Sulzer pump training workshop noted that the training is in three phases.
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