Currently the oil and gas industry is focusing on challenging deep water projects, particularly in Campos Basin located coast off Brazil. However, there are a lot of prolific reservoirs located in shallow water, which need to be developed and they are located in area very far from the coast, where there aren’t pipelines facilities to export oil production, in this case is necessary to use a floating production unit able to storage produced oil, such as a FPSO. So, the riser system configuration should be able to absorb FPSO’s dynamic response due to wave load and avoid damage at touch down zone, in this case is recommended to use compliant riser configuration, such as Lazy Wave, Tethered Wave or Lazy S.
In addition to, the proposed FPSO for Tubarão Martelo development is a type VLCC (Very Large Crude Carrier) using external turret moored system, which cause large vertical motion at riser connection and it presents large static offset. Also are expected to install 26 risers and umbilicals hanging off on the turret, this large number of risers and umbilicals has driven the main concerns to clashing and clearance requirement since Lazy-S configuration was adopted.
In this paper, some numerical model details and recommendations will be presented, which became a feasible challenging risers system in shallow water. For instance, to solve clashing problem it is strictly recommended for modeling MWA (Mid Water Arch) gutter and bend stiffener at top I-tube interface, this recommendation doesn’t matter in deep water, but for shallow water problem is very important. Also is important to use ballast modules in order to solve clashing problems.