NETCO, Nigeria’s biggest indigenous provider of design and Engineering services has announced that it has successfully completed a project for one of Nigeria’s leading international oil companies. The contract was awarded in 2015 to carry out a facility information management project on the client’s Floating Storage and Offloading  Vessel. The project included data gathering, desktop studies and the creation of 3D intelligent models using AVEVA 3D software tools and the as-built 2D documentation.

The FSO vessel was commissioned as the world's first steel hulled new built Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) FSO, constructed for a gas field, offshore Nigeria. This LPG FSO converts propane and butane components of the gas stream into liquid products. The liquid products are stored in the tanks of the FSO hull prior to being offloaded to LPG tankers that are used to transport the LPG to market.

The vessel is critical to the customer’s operations in the region and a reliable set of As-Built documentation was needed to support future modernization and life extension projects. As part of the project, the oil company also wanted to identify any process hazards and assess the condition of the equipment and structures for integrity and reliability.

NETCO commenced project activities by sorting through all the existing information. Gap assessment and gap closure activities involved identifying missing information/ documents and initiating measures to either generate or retrieve and update them.

As part of the information generation and verification activities, NETCO used laser scanning technologies to create a point cloud dataset and an intelligent 3D model using AVEVA software. The AVEVA solution was the key to supporting NETCO's facility information management work scope by transforming the point cloud dataset into an intelligent base model that was then transformed into 2D As-Built documents.

The project was completed in under a year, with an updated Master Document Register (MDR) for the vessel being sent to the client. The updated As-Built information was then presented for validation and has now been signed off. The approved documentation will enable the owner operator to continue utilizing the LPG FSO safely and even potentially support extending its useful service.