ExxonMobil yesterday commissioned a brand new capping stack to be housed here, saying it is demonstrative of its commitment to address any offshore spill eventualities, although it hopes to never have to use the well-sealing equipment.
“We certainly expect never to use this equipment in real life, but we certainly have to look after it, to preserve … ensuring it is always prepared for deployment and we have people prepared and ready to do so. President of ExxonMobil Guyana, Alistair Routledge yesterday said at the commissioning ceremony, held at the Guyana Shorebase Inc (GYSBI) headquarters, Houston, Georgetown.
“Until then, our aim is to ensure we never actually have to use it as our first and foremost focus is preventing any incidents and looking after the environment,” he added.
Built by Trendsetter Engineering, the 22-foot and 93,000-lb piece of equipment with specifications including pressure ratings of 15,000 lbs per square inch and flow rate of 0 to 330,000 barrels of oil per day, is currently being housed at the GYSBI location at Houston until the Vreed-en-Hoop Shore Base which has a man-made island, is completed.
A capping stack acts a well plug and takes similar action to that of a bottle cap. ”A capping stack is a large piece of equipment that can be placed over an oil wellhead in the unlikely event of a spill. The stack acts like a cap to stop an oil leak until engineers can permanently seal the well. It can connect to and cap virtually any subsea wellhead in the event the well’s built-in blowout protector safety device fails,” ExxonMobil explained on a fact sheet about capping stack technology.
Owned by the industry-funded United Kingdom-headquartered, not-for-profit – Oil Spill Response Limited (OSRL) – ExxonMobil will be paying an annual subscription on the equipment, which is one of only two in Latin America, and according to the company, one of 13 in the world.
It is unclear what the annual subscription rates are, as those sums were not immediately available yesterday, with Routledge promising that the company will make it available if needed.
It is part of a larger spill-containment system, ExxonMobil explained, adding, “The new Guyana-based capping stack is the centrepiece of a larger emergency response and spill containment tool kit that ExxonMobil Guyana would deploy in the unlikely event of a spill. Other mitigation measures that ExxonMobil Guyana can readily deploy alongside the capping stack include, but are not limited to, containment booms, skimmer devices, oil dispersants, helicopter surveillance, and surface and wildlife response.”
According to ExxonMobil, its teams regularly conduct spill-containment practice sessions to test, assess, and continuously improve the company’s emergency response capabilities.
Routledge boasted that his company has inaugurated the rapid-response subsea capping technology here, as he encouraged other operators in the region to subscribe so as to also always be prepared for unfortunate eventualities.
‘ExxonMobil Guyana is proud to be the inaugural subscriber to this Guyanese-based capping stack service, providing by OSRL. It is our hope that other operators in Guyana and the neighbouring countries subscribe to this service because that will truly reflect the benefit of bringing this technology to the region… and that all operators drilling wells subscribe to the technology we brought to Guyana,” he added.
