The Platform Nobody Wanted to Work On
The Platform Nobody Wanted to Work On
The noise on the platform was not the kind you get used to. It was the kind that gets inside your chest, that makes conversation impossible and concentration a matter of willpower. Combined with a gas flare that turned the deck into something close to the inside of an oven, it was an environment that pushed people to their limits.
It had pushed the well service crew past theirs. They refused to work there until something changed.
That something was a single seized flange on a single well. Until it moved, all fourteen wells on the platform stayed silent. And every day they stayed silent, the losses mounted.
The call came to ThinJack.
A Long Time Coming
The flange had been waiting for a solution for almost a year.
A previous attempt had left its mark: a broken brass tip, still lodged in the gap, a small monument to how stubborn this particular connection had become. The rust holding the bolts in place was exerting 328 tonnes of force. The gap between the flanges was 9mm.
Previous methods had delivered, at best, around one tonne of separation force.
The gap between what had been tried and what was needed tells its own story.
There was another complication. Getting a technician into Angola required a letter of invitation, and the first one had come back with the wrong nationality. By the time the error was corrected and the visa arrived, six weeks had passed. The pre-job site survey, the step that makes everything else more precise and predictable, had to be abandoned.
ThinJack would be working from experience and careful estimation rather than firsthand knowledge of the flange.
With fourteen wells about to be shut down and the losses accumulating, there was no more time to wait.
Four Days to Ship. Thirty-Seven Hours to Finish
Without the site survey, ThinJack had to estimate how many units would be needed. The order went in on 26th April. Four days later, with manufacturing, quality checks, labelling and packing all complete, equipment was on its way to Paris Charles de Gaulle. From there, a weekly air shuttle to Point Noire in the Congo, then sea freight to the logistics base in Luanda, arriving the weekend of 8th and 9th May.
The platform couldn't wait for customs clearance. Equipment was shipped directly to the platform.
ThinJack mobilised with one technician. Preparation work began at 0600 on 14th May. Access to the flange didn't come until 1815 that evening: first the rust had to be filed back from the flange surfaces, a three-hour operation that included removing the broken tip from the previous attempt. Then, just before 2200, the ThinJack operation began.
Eleven sequential rings of inflation followed through the night. By 1230 the following afternoon, the gap had been forced from 9mm to 39mm. The bolts had been driven through their holes by controlled hydraulic force. The same operation by conventional methods would have taken up to four days, including cutting seized studs and removing them one by one.
The Field Service Engineer returned to the flotel at 1500. He was asleep by 1800.
He had been awake for thirty-seven hours.
What the Numbers Say
The time saving was significant in human terms. In financial terms, it was decisive.
With the platform producing at 50,000 barrels per day across ten wells at $60 per barrel, ThinJack's approach, completing in under twenty-four hours what conventional methods would have taken four days to achieve, translated to approximately $9 million in recovered production.
Against the cost of the operation, the return was not something that required much calculation.
The flange that had resisted everything thrown at it for nearly a year had been separated in a single shift.
Before He Left
Before leaving the platform, ThinJack's Field Service Engineer did one more thing. He walked the deck and photographed every other well: fourteen flanges in various states of corrosion, each one a future job, each one holding similar amounts of seized steel and similar amounts of waiting production.
Some problems, once solved, have a way of showing you how many others have been waiting.
If you'd like to talk about what ThinJack could do for your next project, get in touch - or take a look at how the same approach played out in very different conditions in our UAE and North Sea stories.