Fugro Wins Sakhalin II Survey

Fugro

Fugro Project Ltd, Moscow, has been awarded the contract to undertake a pre-construction survey off Sakhalin Island, off the east coast of Russia, as part of the Sakhalin II Project. Contract awarder is the project's developer, Sakhalin Energy Investment Company Ltd (SEIC).

Sakhalin II is believed to be the largest single integrated oil and gas project ever undertaken. It will enable year-round production of oil and gas from the Piltun Astokhskoye and Lunskoye fields, which at peak will produce 60 million barrels of oil and 9.6 million tons of LNG a year. Fugro Project's tasks are to survey seven proposed pipeline/cable routes from three offshore platform sites to shore off the north east coast of Sakhalin and two proposed pipeline/cable routes from shore to a tanker loading facility off the southern coast of Sakhalin.

The survey uses a suite of survey systems working in water depths from 0-48m. The geophysical work involves the use of single beam echo sounder, sidescan sonar, sub-bottom profiler, swath bathymetry and magnetometer systems. The geotechnical work involves the use of a seabed operated cone penetrometer (CPT) testing unit and a seabed operated rock drilling/coring unit.

The two offshore vessels involved are Fugro's 64m Setouchi Surveyor and Trias, a 71m vessel operated by Fugro's Sakhalin-based partner Pacific Engineering Company (PECO). A third vessel, PECO's 11m Geomarine, will survey the shallow water sections of the routes.

Seabed inspection along the proposed pipeline/cable routes and inspection of anomaly sites located by the geophysical survey will be carried out using a work class ROV system supplied and operated by Sonsub International working off Setouchi Surveyor. Along the proposed pipeline/cable routes Fugro will use its in-house designed and built continuous refraction seismic system to investigate shallow sub-seabed sediments to complement the standard geophysical survey systems which will be ground-truthed by the CPT system. High-accuracy DGPS positioning services are provided by Russia's Svarog Ltd, with oceanographic and weather forecasting services by Fugro GEOS.

This new contract follows work done in 2001 by Fugro on previous phases of the Sakhalin II offshore development, which involved five vessels undertaking a combination of geophysical and geotechnical operations over the site for SEIC.

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