Production availability analysis of Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) systems

Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) systems are currently the popular scheme in offshore oil and gas industry. The profitability of these systems is extremely dependent on their production availabilities. In this article, we report the lessons learned from the assessment of the production availability of a FPSO system. Regarding this study, we used stochastic simulation as the assessment tool because it is naturally suitable for performance evaluation of the production systems. To obtain relevant results, it requires a strong modeling discipline as well as rigorous experimental protocols. By adopting modeling patterns in the production availability analysis, we can model the target systems in a modular way. We propose here to build models by assembling modeling patterns dedicated to production availability studies. We discuss the performed experiments with a special focus on sensitivity analyses. The results by changing the failure rates are validated with those altering the repair rates.