The Terra Nova field is located on the Grand Banks in 95m of water, 350km East-Southeast of St. John’s, Newfoundland. The oil field is producing using a floating production storage and offloading facility and subsea wells, with crude oil transported to market by shuttle tankers. The FPSO is a purpose built, ice strengthened FPSO with forward accommodations and a disconnectable internal turret mooring system located just aft of the accommodations.

The FPSO, which is part of a full field development supplied to Petro-Canada by the Terra Nova Alliance, includes reservoir, drilling/completion, subsea wells, manifolds, flowlines, and flexible risers.

SOFEC designed and engineered the internal, disconnectable turret system for the Terra Nova FPSO. The SOFEC turret permits the vessel to disconnect and reconnect to the mooring to avoid icebergs and severe sea ice conditions. Time for planned riser and buoy disconnect is less than four hours and is fully reversible up to the final disconnecting command.  Time for emergency disconnect is approximately fifteen minutes. The swivel stack consists of low and high pressure fluid swivels, low and high pressure utility swivels, power and optical swivels. The turret uses a nine leg group catenary chain with a heavy excursion limiter mooring system.

The Terra Nova Alliance, a consortium of companies, led by Petro-Canada conducted the project. The Alliance consisted of: FMC Offshore Canada Company, Shawmont Brown & Root, Halliburton Energy Services, PCL Industrial Constructors, Coflexip Stena Offshore, and Doris ConPro.

The SOFEC disconnectable internal turret mooring system is classed with Lloyd's Register of Shipping.

General Description