SENEGAL/ MAURITANIA: CIMC Raffles Deliveres the First FEED+EPC Project to BP

The GTA Hub QU jack-up accommodation platform designed and built by CIMC Raffles for BP, an international energy giant, was delivered at its construction site in Yantai with 4 million man-hours without injury. The BP’s GTA project is with the best aggregative indicator among its peers on the Mauritania and Senegal maritime border and is the first offshore facility to begin service.

The First FEED+EPC Project Contracted by a Domestic Shipyard

On April 1, 2019, CIMC Raffles and BP signed the EPC contract of the project in Yantai, which is the first time that BP directly signed the FEED (front-end engineering design) + EPC turnkey contract with a Chinese shipyard for the offshore platform project. As is customary in the oil and gas industry, international oil companies usually sign contracts with well-known offshore turnkey contractors, who handle the high value-added design and procurement work, and then subcontract construction work to shipyards.

The direct cooperation between the two parties means that CIMC Raffles has the capability of benchmarking with the world-class turnkey contractors in the oil and gas industry. CIMC Raffles is responsible for the front-end design, detailed design, construction design, material and equipment procurement, as well as the whole cycle of platform construction, installation and commissioning, truly providing users with a full range of services from demand to concept, from design to construction, from installation and commissioning to final product delivery.

The self-mounted platform is 95 meters long and 70 meters wide and weighs more than 10,000 tons. It has the floor area of a football field and weighs as much as more than 2,000 African elephants. The platform is set up with living and accommodation areas for 216 staff, leisure and entertainment areas, offices, generator stations, water treatment plants and other facilities needed to operate the LNG terminal. It also contains the main control room and the port control room, which are used to manage the many vessels passing around the busy LNG energy hub.

The platform is designed and constructed to meet the requirements of 25 years without docking maintenance, and the coating process requires that the metal surface treatment meet the P3 standard and the paint Sa3 standard. The accommodation area is designed to meet the requirements of emergency shelter, and the noise control of the accommodation and office area is less than 45 decibels, which is equivalent to the ambient sound of the suburb at night, all of which are the top quality requirements in the industry.

This project has submitted nearly 10,000 management and technical drawings and more than 6,000 equipment package drawings for review, and the workload is more than 10 times that of other similar projects. The cable length of the platform exceeds 540,000 meters, and more than 9000 explosion-proof equipment is set up. Meanwhile, the piping material adopts 53% high proportionate high-grade metal instead of non-carbon steel in order to improve the anti-corrosion ability of the pipe system, which is far superior to other jack-up projects in both physical quantity and process design. The platform has completed a total of more than 35,000 mechanical completion inspection points, almost equivalent to that of a semi-submersible platform. However, the requirements and workload of a single inspection point are twice that of other offshore engineering projects. With 372 mechanical completion certificates signed, nearly 9000 debug checklists were used to record every function and signal, 40 systems signed over, this project has achieved the highest overall efficiency in BP’s history with the perfect and seamless process.

It is worth mentioning that, with the cooperation of all the teams, the platform achieved high-quality, zero-injury delivery and was awarded with the certificate of “Zero Injury for 4 Million Man-Hours” issued by BP. Rahman Rahmanov, Vice President of BP GTA oilfield project company, stressed at the delivery ceremony that the most remarkable achievement of the project is that there is no accident causing any loss of man-hours.