Amarinth Supplies Rotatable Bare Shaft Pumps for Glen Lyon FPSO
Amarinth engineer working on a pump (Image source: Amarinth Ltd.)
Background: wear in mature fields
As oil and gas fields age, operating conditions often change. More sand in the produced fluids and more aggressive media can cause erosive wear in process pumps. Replacing a complete pump or overhauling it can mean high capital costs, changes to the deck structure and pipework, and long maintenance shutdowns.
How the programme works
Under the programme, operators keep bare shaft pumps on standby as strategic spares. When a pump is worn, site or offshore technicians swap it for a spare unit. The removed pump goes back to Amarinth, where it is stripped, inspected with non-destructive testing and refurbished to OEM standards. It then returns to the operator’s spares pool.
Application on the Glen Lyon FPSO
Amarinth reports a contract from the operator of the Glen Lyon Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel. The vessel lies about 110 miles west of Shetland and is the central processing hub for the Quad 204 redevelopment, which covers the Schiehallion and Loyal fields.
In 2012, Amarinth supplied API 610 OH2 centrifugal pumps for the vessel’s produced water treatment and its re-injection system for maintaining reservoir pressure. As the field matured, more sand entered the produced water and caused erosion in the pumps. The operator then ordered two new bare shaft API 610 OH2 pumps to set up a rotating maintenance pool.
The operator’s existing stock of spare parts, including mechanical seals and couplings, was used in building the new pumps. Amarinth inspected all of these parts and replaced worn components such as gaskets and secondary seals. According to Amarinth, the operator has since decided to extend the approach to more of its pumps.
Oliver Brigginshaw, Managing Director of Amarinth, commented: “Operators worldwide are balancing the need to extend the economic life of offshore assets with intense pressure to control operating expenditure and lower lifecycle emissions. The challenges experienced on the Glen Lyon FPSO for example, where changing fluid compositions introduced severe sand erosion years into the equipment design life, are common across the global energy and process sectors. Our bare shaft supply and circular refurbishment programme gives operators a structured, low-risk mechanism to manage asset integrity. By rotating bare shaft assemblies and recertifying client-held spares inventory, operators can maintain uncompromised process uptime under severe conditions while extracting full economic value from existing assets. This approach proves that sustainable, circular engineering and operational resilience can go hand in hand across multi-decade operating lifecycles.”
The programme is available for Amarinth’s API 610 and ISO 5199 centrifugal pumps. Amarinth says it can also be applied to many obsolete or third-party pumps that require hydraulic or dimensional interchangeability.
Source: Amarinth Ltd.
