Arun Duggal is the Director of Research and Development at SOFEC, Inc., a business unit of the MODEC Group. His responsibilities range from overseeing research and development activities in mooring technology, to managing projects related to mooring systems. He has been employed at SOFEC for 20 years, working on several ground breaking projects like the Terra Nova FPSO, the Kizomba A & B FPSOs, and FPSOs for the pre-salt basin offshore Brazil. He has been an active participant in industry conferences and meetings, authoring and presenting over 50 papers.
Arun is a graduate of the Stanford Executive Program at Stanford University. He has also received his Ph.D. degree (Ocean Engineering) from Texas A&M University, a M.S. degree (Ocean Engineering) from the University of Miami, FL, and his B.Tech. degree (Civil Engineering) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India.
Terra Nova – the World’s first“Arctic” FPSO
The Terra Nova field is located on the Grand Banks in 95m ofwater, 350km East-Southeast of St. John’s, Newfoundland.The oil field is producing using a floating production storageand offloading facility and subsea wells, with crude oiltransported to market by shuttle tankers. The FPSO is apurpose built, ice strengthened FPSO with forwardaccommodations and a disconnectable internal turretmooring system located just aft of the accommodations.The FPSO, which is part of a full field development suppliedto Petro-Canada by the Terra Nova Alliance, includesreservoir, drilling/completion, subsea wells, manifolds,flowlines, and flexible risers.
SOFEC designed and engineered the internal disconnectable turret system for the Terra Nova FPSO. The 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 atenary chain with a heavy excursion limiter mooring system.