Aye Aye you frisky bunch of beauties,
Please do not judge my blog subjects on this session as I am merely setting out how I have come to be where I am. As soon as we get underway on our voyage things will become more interesting and entertaining.
Well here we are a little later than planned and not exactly 'where' planned, but here none the less.
Here is 10 miles southwest of Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. We have been installing a new pipeline and single buoy mooring as a rejuvenation project to enable PNG to continue to export crude oil form it’s Kumul Platform, which is 180 miles North West of here.
The platform itself does not actually produce any oil and is just a pressure relief station situated far enough off shore for large tankers to be able to load the oil.
The crude itself comes form about 275 kilometres away over the mountain from the oilfield there.
It is first pumped 350 meters up to the top of the mountain at 1000meters and then runs by gravity the 275ks to the platform. When it reaches the platform most of the 75 bar (or 1087 psi) pressure has been lost to friction on the journey and is discharged into the tankers at about 5 to 7 bar.
A single Buoy Mooring is a floating buoy about the size of a three-bed semi that has a revolving turret. It is connected to the seabed by six large piled anchors and has a flexible pipeline coming up form the seabed carrying the oil. From the turret is a massive hawser used to secure the bow of the export tanker and a floating pipeline for the oil. The export tanker manoeuvres itself bow to the buoy and attaches the hawser. The floating pipeline is then lifted to the export tanker connected to the vessels cargo manifold and it’s a case of fill her up.
At this terminal they have one tanker a fortnight at about 1500,000 to 200,000 tonnes at about $ 700 a tonne. That's about $140 million a fortnight and this place is a minnow in oil production. Nice.
As we have finished the work we demob most of the project crew and just keep the essential marine crew and a maintenance crew aboard for the journey back to Johor Baru (2883 miles)
The first boat carrying 50 passengers made the 180-mile trip in 11 hours had discharged the passengers and was leaving port to come back for the rest when she ran aground on a reef 500 meters from shore.
She had to wait for high tide to float off and luckily was not taking any water but it seemed that 3 of her 4 propellers were trashed.
We still have 60 passengers that are expecting to be home for christmas so we have steamed over to our current position and are going to ferry the men ashore by a smaller local crew boat that would have been unable to make the 360 mile round trip to our original position.
The logistical nightmare of that many men being landed at one time in a shit house of a place like Port Moresby is hard to fathom as there are only limited numbers of flights out and a very limited number of extremely dodgy hotels. So far several of our people have been robbed in their own hotel rooms with one attempted car jacking where the driver of the minibus just ran right over the two people attempting it and did not hesitate or slow down until the guys were at the airport. Apparently that is just the way it is here so now the people paying off are held in an armed compound like barracks and ferried to the airport in armed motorcade to prevent further attacks.
It is a seething cesspool of robbery, rape, violence and general lawlessness that is more akin to the 18th century than the 21st. It makes spending time in Nigeria seem like a five start hotel with fluffy kittens and puppies everywhere wanting to play.
So we are here the crew boat has arrived and the first bunch of guys are off for their first night in the compound awaiting flights out. A soon as we have custom clearance we will be setting a course of 277 degrees for Bramble Cay island which is the pilotage entrance to the Torres Strait.
I will be logging on in the morning with the first of voyage proper.
Cheers
Love and Peace
Bentley
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