Bluewater Energy Services has promised to comply with two warnings issued by safety regulators after nearly 500 outstanding mechanical corrosion and defects reports were found on one of its vessels.
What's Wrong?
The company was served by the United Kingdom's Health & Safety Executive (HSE) on Jan. 10 for failings on the Haewene Brim floating production, storage and offloading vessel, which operates on the Pierce field in the central North Sea (east of Scotland) for Shell. Bluewater has until Aug. 31 to correct all of the problems.
The notices were made public on Wednesday (March 22) and point to discrepancies in Bluewater's management following an inspection of two separate hydrocarbon releases in April and September of last year.
According to energyvoice.com, an improvement notice stated, "An investigation of two hydrocarbon release incidents on 26th April 2016 and 3rd September 2016 uncovered deficiencies in management of change of process conditions and process plant equipment as an underlying cause. … Furthermore, a gap analysis report completed by the company identified 328 requests for modification (RM's) not suitably closed out."
In all, an inspection at the end of November 2016 found 478 open mechanical corrosion and defects reports, 262 of which were on safety critical elements.
Background
The Haewene Brim was build in 1996 at the Samsung shipyard in Korea as a multi-purpose shuttle tanker and was converted to an FPSO in Newcastle in 1998. It has been operational for Shell since 1999.
Since then, production said been suspended several times for overhauls. In July 2004, workers added a water injection topsides module, which took roughly three months to complete, with production resuming in October 2004.
The Bluewater FPSO also got an engine overhaul in 2015 when Royston Limited engineers scheduled 48,000 hours of service to dismantle one of the engines and update the cylinder headsand liners, pistons, con rods, cam shafts and bearings. Remedial work was also done on another engine.
Moving Forward
Bluewater released a statement saying that "rectification has been started," adding that fixes will be complete by the August deadline, but did not give specifics.
A spokesperson for Shell confirmed the notices on Wednesday and said that the company is "supporting Bluewater as they address the requirements of these improvement notices."
Original source: www.paintsquare.com