Offshore Energy Today.Com said: Malaysia’s Bumi Armada has secured a loan amounting up to $1.12 billion from several banks.

The company will use the proceeds to deliver a floating, production, storage and offloading unit – FPSO – which will be leased to Italy’s Eni, under a contract signed in August, 2014.

The FPSO, to be named Armada Olombendo FPSO, be deployed at Eni’s Block 15/06 East Hub field development, located offshore Angola.

More precisely, Bumi Armada will use the cash to part-finance the Project, reimburse all costs and expenses in relation to the acquisition, conversion, refurbishment, mobilization, transportation, hook-up, mooring and installation of the FPSO, together with all ancillary and related work.

Singapore’s Keppel is building the FPSO by reconfiguring the former Armada Ali supertanker, which has a storage capacity of 1.8 million barrels. The FPSO will be positioned over the Cabaça North and Cabaça Southeast fields, about 350 kilometres north of Luanda, and producing up to 80,000 barrels a day by the end of 2016. That didn’t quite happen as we saw her today but impressive doesn’t cover it. Colour me happy and amazed. So what is an FPSO ??? was our next question.

Thank you to Wiki for the diagram and description: A Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) unit is a floating vessel used by the offshore oil and gas industry for the production and processing of hydrocarbons, and for the storage of oil. A FPSO vessel is designed to receive hydrocarbons produced by itself or from nearby platforms or subsea template, process them, and store oil until it can be offloaded onto a tanker or, less frequently, transported through a pipeline. FPSO’s are preferred in frontier offshore regions as they are easy to install, and do not require a local pipeline infrastructure to export oil. FPSO’s can be a conversion of an oil tanker or can be a vessel built specially for the application.

Advantages: Floating production, storage and offloading vessels are particularly effective in remote or deep water locations, where seabed pipelines are not cost effective. FPSO’s eliminate the need to lay expensive long-distance pipelines from the processing facility to an onshore terminal. This can provide an economically attractive solution for smaller oil fields, which can be exhausted in a few years and do not justify the expense of installing a pipeline. Furthermore, once the field is depleted, the FPSO can be moved to a new location.

Armada Kraken is a harsh-environment FPSO unit that is designed for operations in the North Sea. The FPSO vessel, which has a design life of 25 years without dry-docking, will be deployed to produce the heavy oil found in the EnQuest-operated Kraken field in the UK sector of the North Sea.

Armada Kraken is able to handle a peak fluid rate of 460,000 barrels per day (bpd) and 80,000 barrels of oil per day (bopd), 275,000 bpd of water injection, 20 million standard cubic feet (MMscf) of gas handling and has a storage capacity of 600,000 barrels. Wow.

One of the other Armada girls at work.

I never did get an angle where I had all five tugs in the frame, just four.

The three at the front...........

..........and the two at the back.

Now and then.

Armada Kraken began life as Prisco Alcor built in 2007.

A very slightly different rear end............to what she used to look like.

Her splendid portrait.

Her vital statistics are: 285 in length, 50 metres wide and a 16.7 metre draught. Gross tonnage of 86,952 and a DWT of 166,546. She is due to set sail in the coming days and is due in the North Sea in the middle of January.

 ALL IN ALL WHAT A WAY TO MEET MY FIRST FPSO’S

                    UNIQUE AND VERY IMPRESSIVE