ARCO Pertamina Ardjuna Offshore NGL Recovery Plant - EPC

Fluor first performed a feasibility study and then provided engineering, procurement and construction management to Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) and Pertamina for the world's first totally offshore NGL recovery, storage and loading facility in the North Java Sea in Indonesia.

The complex 125,000-barrels-per-day facility is located 35 miles off the coast in the Ardjuna field. The project was performed on a seismically active seabed in water depths up to 145 feet with 28-foot storm waves. The project scope covers eight new platforms, 41,000-horsepower of natural gas compression, 19,500-horsepower of refrigeration and recycled gas compression, a large gas and crude processing plant, a quartering facility for 150-man crew, a central process plant, flow stations, a single-buoy mooring terminal to serve both a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) storage vessel and transient LPG tankers, and approximately 40 miles of subsea pipeline.

Client's Challenge

ARCO and Pertamina joined to build a totally offshore NGL facility in the Java Sea. ARCO serves as operator for a group of American firms which have a production sharing contract with Pertamina, the Indonesian state-owned oil company.

The plant includes systems for gas gathering, gas compression, dehydration, chill-down and turbo-expansion, fractionation and LPG treating, spiking excess gas liquids back into the crude, and product shipping facilities.

The facility consists of two interconnected eight-pile platforms for the NGL process plant, one four-pile platform for crew quarters, four four-pile compressor station platforms, flare platforms and bridges, 40 miles of submarine pipeline and a single-point mooring system for a 375,000 bbl capacity refrigerated storage barge.

Fluor's Solution

In addition to the EPC scope on this mega project, Fluor was responsible for the engineering and design of the process facilities and procurement of all materials and equipment. In the recovery process, gas and oil are gathered from the four widely separated platforms, transported to a central plant by pipelines and processed through a turbo-expander plant to produce a propane/butane LPG mix and a butane and heavier product, which is “spiked” back into the crude. The oil is stabilized at the central plant to remove the butane and lighter material. After being stabilized, the crude is spiked and then stored in either of two one-million-barrel storage tanks. The residue gas from the plant is pipelined to storage for use as fuel to a local steel mill.

A plant of this size would normally require five acres on land, yet Fluor engineered it to function on only one acre of platform deck space. Fluor used modular construction of 21 prefabricated single lift modules for total plant assembly.

The modules included a refrigeration unit, five piperack modules, six air cooler modules, and a dehydrator. The outlying gas compressor stations provide 40,000 hp of natural gas compression. The plant's turbine generators and compressors use methane fuel derived from natural gas on the job site.

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Conclusion

Fluor first performed a feasibility study to determine whether the NGL recovery plant could be built in the seismically active area.

Fluor performed engineering, procurement, and construction management using a modular construction approach to assemble the world's first totally offshore NGL recovery, storage and loading plant.