TOTAL is mooring its new floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel over the Pazflor field, in readiness for start-up of the field using the world’s first field-lifetime subsea-separation facilities. Pazflor’s four reservoirs are due to start flowing in the second half of the year, at plateau adding 220,000 barrels a day (b/d) to the company’s existing 460,000 b/d of production from Angola’s Block 17 (PE 2/11 p12).
Pazflor’s successful start-up will be seen as a big step forward for subsea processing – a suite of technologies forecast to be used extensively as smaller and more difficult deep-water fields are developed. Moving processing to the seabed will reduce platform requirements and cut project costs.
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