With no backup equipment, Exxon will flare every time it does routine maintenance

With no backup equipment, Exxon will flare every time it does routine maintenance – Industry Expert

Feb 07, 2021 News

Exxon flaring at its Liza Destiny vessel offshore Guyana

Kaieteur News – Without backup on standby at its Liza Destiny Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel, ExxonMobil will flare every time it has to execute routine maintenance. Making these and other critical points is an expert in the oil and gas industry who spoke to Kaieteur News on the condition of anonymity.
“The solution is to have a redundant backup or two smaller compressors, each with greater than 50% needed capacity, working side by side, so you can have at least that amount of compression available, should one go offline,” the expert indicated to Kaieteur News.
Their comments come on the heels of Exxon’s increased flaring from pilot levels at its Liza One operation offshore, which the oil giant reported over a week ago.
Exxon finally came out to the press on Friday, where it gave an update on their defective gas compressor which had led to the increased flaring. The oil giant had stated that a technical team had removed the “3rd stage compressor from the package enclosure” on the Liza Destiny FPSO, and was preparing it for transport onshore. The oil company further stated, that an initial examination had determined that the unit had to be sent for repairs in Germany and expected to arrive there on February 9.
“The full extent of the damage will not be known until a detailed inspection of the compressor can take place at the workshop of the manufacturer, MAN Turbo in Germany,” Exxon said.
These details, however, are in dissimilarity to what was told to Kaieteur News by the Director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Sharifah Razack, earlier last week. Razack had told this publication that an internal inspection of the equipment will be done onboard the FPSO, with aims of determining whether the defective internal mechanical seal, which led to the increased flaring, could be reseated or needed replacing.
The Director mentioned too, that if the equipment needed replacement, a backup seal was present in Guyana.
It is unclear why the equipment needs to be sent to Germany, especially if backup equipment is already in Guyana. This could indicate that during the initial inspections of the gas compressor, faults that are separate from the defective seal were discovered by the technical team. Efforts were made to ascertain those details from Razack, but up to press time, this publication had received no response from her.

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